Facebook pages alert! Your page ‘likes’ will be reduced in a few weeks

If you are running a Facebook page for your business, social or personal reasons, and have a huge amount of Likes on the page, be prepared for a little disappointment. Facebook is on a new rule, which will change that number and push it down by a bit. A new algorithm by Facebook will be out soon, which will monitor the Likes to a Facebook page, analyses it and eliminates the ones which are not relevant or unreal.

Facebook has officially confirmed about the move and has stated that they will start the move in the next few weeks. “Businesses use Page audience data to understand what their followers care about. To make audience data even more meaningful for businesses, we’re updating the way Page likes are counted by removing memorialised and voluntarily deactivated accounts from Pages’ like counts. This change ensures that data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date,” says a post on Facebook’s news page.

In short, Facebook is changing the way it will count the Likes on a page. Facebook will subtract likes according to the algorithm it incorporates while evaluating the page and the page’s followers. For example, if the like is from a Facebook profile that is deactivated or memoralised after the owner has passed away, the likes will be subtracted from the page.

There’s more sad news ahead—if the Facebook account (person) that liked your page is inactive for quite a while, that Like from that account will also be deducted from your page. In short, the Likes that have come from accounts that are not active, dead or faked, will be counted as numbers to be deducted from the page.

So how would Facebook’s new move benefit you with your business page?

Removing inactive Facebook accounts

There are two primary benefits to removing voluntarily deactivated and memorialised Facebook accounts from Pages’ like counts:

• Business results: Removing inactive Facebook accounts from Page audience data gives businesses up-to-date insights on the people who actively follow their Page and makes it easier for businesses to find people like their followers through tools like lookalike audiences.
• Consistency: We already filter out likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialised accounts from individual Page posts, so this update keeps data consistent.

Going forward, any accounts that are voluntarily deactivated or memorialised will be removed from a Page’s like count. If a deactivated account is reactivated, the account will be re-added to a Page’s like count.

If your page has a few hundred Likes on it, there are chances that you may lose out on a few and it may not pinch you as much. But if your page has a few million Likes, Facebook’s new rule can take away a good chunk from that number. So if you are someone whose job is to ensure that the company’s Facebook page Likes need to go up, you better ensure that you show your boss this article.