The latest change comes with the announcement from Facebook that they are going to be handling your Like count differently for your business pages and this change will likely cause you to see a drop in your overall numbers.
While this sounds like it could potentially be reason for great concern, knowing the reasons behind the change will help ease your mind.
What Facebook plans is to eliminate are those who have disabled their accounts or those who have passed away. The thought process that brings this change is that they are not truly followers of your page and your content any longer and therefore should not show in your active stats. This change is not intended to target those who have active accounts. Pages with a larger following will likely see the biggest impact simply based on having more numbers but even with that, don’t expect the change to be drastic.
The argument has been made that just because Uncle Tom may have passed, that doesn’t remove the fact that he liked this company or product. The issue with this is the past tense version that comes with his passing. This person is not truly an active follower and ultimately gives administrators of pages false data when basing things upon numbers that really aren’t accurate. Each post is aimed at reaching your audience and hopefully, inspiring an action; whether it be a “like”, comment, sale or other form of feedback. When someone has disabled their account or passed away, they have absolutely no means of engaging. Take this thought and fast forward several years. As time goes, more people will have passed away or possibly disabled accounts only making data that much more unreliable.
You can expect this change to start rolling out March 12th. We’d love to hear if you notice dips in your counts and your thoughts on this new change. Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.
