Welcome to our new blog feature, Wonk Wednesday. Weird name for a blog series? Yes. Not sure what a wonk is? Let me share! It’s someone who is super studious and takes major interest in the little details. So, on Wednesdays – we’ll dive into the minutia of data (all social platforms, analytics and more), offering a better understanding of how it can work with your digital strategy! Got it? Great! Let’s get moving!

Every business on Facebook is looking to have: 1) meaningful connections with their audience and, 2) a quality audience, made up of real people. So what happens when Facebook decides to remove inactive or deleted accounts from your audience totals? On March 12, many organizations found out the hard way!

Here’s how the headlines read early March of 2015:

“Making Page Likes More Meaningful” Facebook 

“Why Facebook Pages’ Like Totals May Drop” – AdWeek

“Facebook warns Page owners their like counts will drop on March 12” – VentureBeat.com

Even the popular rumor killing site Snopes.com addressed the upcoming cleanse as many people felt it wouldn’t actually happen, and assigned it a status of “mostly true.”

Still not sure how all of this affects you?

Here’s the scoop:

Facebook grows when people share content, and it gains even more when people interact with their friends through a share, like or comment. With a massive user base totaling over one billion, Facebook recognized that millions of accounts were inactive, or simply not in use for a variety of reasons. For that reason, they announced their effort to clean up millions of these inactive accounts by permanently deleting them from their servers. Many of these accounts were in use at some point and had attached themselves to brand pages through likes, comments and shares. The announcement was made on March 4th and most inactive accounts were scheduled to be removed on March 12. With that, meant all of those likes, shares and comments tied to brand pages would also disappear. I know, I know… we have attachment issues to. It’s hard to lose those numbers!

What can you do?

This is where it’s very important for brands to be proactive with knowing how the server purge has affected their own Facebook pages. Some pages might not notice a dip in likes at all, but some might have been affected significantly. If a page experienced a loss, here are a few reasons why:

1.  If your organization has a page with millions of likes, a drop would occur specifically because of the vast number of likes the page has acquired. Odds are that the audience included many of the accounts that were flagged as inactive.

2. If your organization paid a company to purchase page likes, and did not have a good strategy in place, a drop in likes is inevitable. By strategy, we are looking at a system of checks and balances through audience targeting to determine if you are paying for quality, local Facebook users (people who actually want to see your stuff). Your organization may have paid for hundreds or thousands of likes from bot accounts (I know, this pains us too… there are a lot of fraudulent companies out there). If these accounts weren’t used frequently, they attributed to an empty audience base. As a result, your page would have lost a fair amount of those likes on the March 12th culling.

Here’s an example with our client – Wild American Shrimp.

Wild American Shrimp actually grew through the server purge, due to a strong focus on sharing content and engaging its audience. In contrast, a very general page like “Shrimp” saw a large dip in likes. 

If your page did lose likes and followers, that’s okay! Your new number is indicative of REAL people who chose to “like” you, and engage with your brand. That’s important, and is valuable data! Now you have a metric to move forward with, using a strategy that is beneficial to building a stronger, more active community for your brand. 

Here’s where we’d like to hear from you: Did your page lose any likes through the purge? Did you grow? Did you know Facebook eliminated millions of accounts on March 12th? What are you waiting for? Get to commenting!