Facebook to Begin Deleting Inactive Likes From Business Pages-Truth!

Facebook to Begin Deleting Inactive Likes From Business Pages – Truth!

Summary of eRumor:  

Facebook will delete “inactive likes” from business pages on the social network.
 

The Truth:

 

This eRumor is true.

Facebook said it would begin to delete “likes” that came from accounts that are no longer active in mid-March of 2015. The change was supposed to ensure “data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date,” the social network said: 

“There are two primary benefits to removing voluntarily deactivated and memorialized 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 memorialized accounts from individual Page posts, so this update keeps data consistent.”

Facebook said the change wouldn’t have much impact on individuals, but that business pages would probably notice a “small dip” in their number of likes.

Some businesses have been known to purchase Facebook likes for their pages from “click farms” in the past. By hiring click farms, businesses are able to make their pages appear more popular than they actually are. If those likes came from accounts that have since been deactivated, the new policy would wipe them out. But other click farms will continue to thrive, the Huffington Post reports

“The CEO of Dhaka-based social media promotion firm Unique IT World said he has paid workers to manually click on clients’ social media pages, making it harder for Facebook, Google and others to catch them. ‘Those accounts are not fake, they were genuine,’ Shaiful Islam said.”

And it’s not just businesses that pay for likes. Even the U.S. State Department got in on the action. A 2013 report found that the State Department had paid $630,000 to boost its social media numbers. Its likes jumped from 100,000 to 2 million over that time.