As the social network sweeps clean all bogus activity, page fan counts drop by the tens of thousands. Some administrators woke up to discover that their Pages had lost thousands of “Likes” overnight, but it appears those “fans” were actually among the millions of fake or malicious accounts cluttering the social network.
In fact, the social media giant last month announced that it would initiate this massive deletion process, but it was unclear when, hence, they are part of a subset Facebook likes to refer to as likes “gained by means that violate our terms.” To you and me, that means fake or fraudulent likes. According to TechCrunch, Facebook confirmed today that the time is now.
According to various news reports, “A Like that does not come from someone truly interested in connecting with a Page benefits no one. Real identity, for both users and brands on Facebook, is important to not only Facebook’s mission of helping the world share, but also the need for people and customers to authentically connect to the Pages they care about. When a Page and fan connect on Facebook, we want to ensure that connection involves a real person interested in hearing from a specific Page and engaging with that brand’s content.”
More so, the company said at the time that it had increased its “automated efforts to remove Likes on Pages that may have been gained by means that violate our Facebook Terms.” As a result, the social network is working to remove Likes obtained via malware, compromised accounts, deceived users, or purchased bulk Likes.
But more importantly, metrics from PageData, a Facebook analytics service, indicated that Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker Page dropped by 96,000 fans yesterday and that FarmVille lost more than 45,000 likes. Meanwhile, the Pages of celebrities such as Rihanna and Lady Gaga saw drops of 22,000 and 31,700, respectively.
Admittedly, this initiative will provide brands with an increase in “true engagement.” Facebook said that, on average, less than 1 percent of Likes on any given page will be removed. Besides, Facebook was conceived on the principle of real identity and we want this same authenticity to extend to Pages, said the company in a security note in August.
Below is the daily data for the top 15 Facebook pages, provided by PageData. Notice anything?
Metric data on Facebook’s top pages by fan counts and their daily growth. (Credit: PageData )
Last month, Facebook said that 8.7 percent of its more than 950 million user accounts are duplicates, mis-classified, or “undesirable.” However, this update to their security systems will go far to improve integrity, as eradicating fake likes from fraudulent accounts is a nice fall cleaning for the network. But getting rid of the fake likes is treating the symptom. The problem remains that it is incredibly easy to create a fake account on Facebook (or multiple fake accounts) and inflate a page’s like total.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.