On Facebook blog we can read that “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”. The aim of removing likes from deactivated and momorialized accounts was to enable Facebook  users to benefit from meaningful information so that Facebook Pages are even more valuable for businesses. According to the Business News Daily, the process of removing likes will last for the next few weeks and will make it easier for businesess to expand their reach.

Friday the 13th – a killing date for Facebook Pages’ likes

We registered the most significant drop in Pages’ likes on March, 13th. However it was only a starting date of the spring cleaning that is supposed to last for the next few weeks. The chart below shows the average increase/decrease on the number of likes of US and UK Facebook Pages.

Change in the number of Facebook likes

As you can see, the decreases are visible also for March, 14th and March, 15th. Even though they are not so remarkable, they differed a lot from the previous upward trend. On March, 17th the decrease slowed down and the process of new likes’ acquisition returned to its previous pace.

Percent of Pages the decrease was observed on

Although Facebook Pages for various reasons lose their likes everyday, usually these drops are not significant (nor visible) and regard not more than 25% of Pages a day (remember that everyday it concerns different pages). However, between March, 13th and March, 18th, we saw a remarkable increase in the number of profiles on which we registered a drop in the number of likes.

Pages that lost the most likes on Facebook

The most significant falls affected Pages having between 5k and 10k fans. An average Facebook Page from this size class lost about 0, 25% likes. In other groups the drops were not as eminent, amounting to around 0, 15% among the Pages between 1-2k likes and 200-500k likes. Pages having over 500k likes suffered the spring likes purge the least.

On average a Facebook Page lost about 30 likes, but 1/4 of all Facebook Pages lost over 230 likes.

17% of Pages lost fewer than 50 likes

9% of Pages lost from 50 to 100 likes

21% of Pages lost from 100 to 1k likes

7% of Pages lost fewer than 5k likes

2% of Pages lost from 5k to 10k likes

4% of Pages lost over 10k likes

 And how many Facebook likes did you lose?