Your Facebook Page Like Count is Going to Drop Starting from Today

If you manage a Facebook page, you might soon see an unwelcome change. Starting from today, a Facebook update might reduce your page likes.

Facebook has announced that they will be purging voluntarily deactivated and memorialised accounts from Facebook pages. This means that businesses and pages might see a reduction in the page likes as likes from people who have either deactivated their accounts or memorialized accounts will get deleted.

Page admins are currently seeing the following at the top of their insight tab on their managed pages:

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.

Comments and posts from users who have deactivated their accounts have already been removed from pages.

Thus may come as shocking or upsetting to some people but Facebook argues that “everyone benefits from meaningful information on Facebook. It’s our hope that this update makes Pages even more valuable for businesses.”

This is not new as Instagram deleted spam accounts back in December from many of its users’ followers causing user follower counts to drop by thousands or even millions in some cases.

This decrease will start from March 12 and should continue over the next few weeks. Page admins might be disappointed to see like counts drop but one could argue a like count that reflects actual users instead of inflated numbers is more useful.

It’s worth mentioning here that any users who reactivate their accounts will have their likes automatically reverted and added to the page count.