Why Did My Facebook Followers Disappear?

Call it the “Penguin” update of Facebook. Finally the social media giant is getting smart about who it eats for lunch.

Many of you may have woken up this morning and looked at your Facebook business page in shock. Some of you may have lost a few followers. Others may have lost hundreds. Then there are those businesses that lost hundreds of thousands.

Why?

Because on March 12, Facebook “purged” brand pages from inactive likes.

Over the last couple of years, Facebook has been inundated with garbage likes and followers through external click-farms – usually that operate out of third world countries.

As I mentioned in a recent article, not only is it a sign of insecurity for a company or an individual to buy “friends”…but it’s damaging. It reduces the actual organic reach and engagement that they would otherwise receive if they weren’t diluting their following.

Facebook didn’t specifically talk about the fake likes in a recent blog post – but they did mention a factor that might impact your count that had nothing to do with gaming the system.

“To make audience data even more meaningful for businesses, we’re updating the way Page likes are counted by removing memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts from Pages’ like counts.

Don’t be angry. Don’t be sad. This is good stuff.

Facebook explained it like this.

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.

So how do you take advantage of the following that you have to boost your organic reach? The answer is simple. Video, video, video.

Socialbakers ran a comparative analysis of 4,445 brand pages and more than 670,000 posts from October 1, 2014 to February 4, 2015. As you can see in the chart, they found that photos are now the least likely post type to reach audiences. Videos, on the other hand, crush it – resulting in a 135% increase in organic reach over video.

We ran some numbers on 30 of our clients over the past 60 days specifically on non-promoted video content that averaged less than 60 seconds long for each clip. We found that the minimum increase for our clients utilizing video was over 2,000% in organic reach – and as high as 5,000%.

Now the argument can obviously be made that these studies are comparing apples and oranges. After all, content that’s got a higher level of engagement will always have the largest organic reach.

The bottom line? Stop worry about the quantity of your friends on Facebook and start worrying about the quality of your posts.

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POSTED BY

Kyle Reyes is the President and Creative Director of The Silent Partner Marketing, New England's #1 Marketing Agency. We're a boutique marketing firm focused on helping businesses grow in an age of exploding technology. You can find him on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.