By Kelly Rogan, on 17 April 2015
In early March, Facebook- the most known social network worldwide –announced the news that it has revolutionized the world of Social Media Marketing: the elimination of the "Like" from inactive or disabled accounts on the official websites.
What does this mean? In other words, Facebook will update the method for counting the number of fans from the business pages.
Currently, it receives 4,500 million likes each day, and it is that 47% of social network users that say Facebook has generated a greater impact on purchasing decisions than any other Social Network.
It is for this reason that companies are increasingly investing in a Content Marketing strategy and outreaching through social networks. But how does this change affect them?
This policy was implemented last March 12th and today we have already begun to notice the consequences.
In order to verify this empirically, we conducted a test within our own communities to measure the impact of this news in our case.
Comparing the number of fans of the pages from the time we received the news with the results to date on April 1st, we observed that:
- In the second week of March a significant decrease in followers was observed in all our communities.
- Those with fans between 150,000 and 200,000, with a very high share -, had a loss of between 1,000 and 5,000 users.
- Those who had more than 250,000 followers had a negative variation of 5% - 10%, which in absolute numbers represented a decrease of 10,000, 25,000 and even 50,000 'likes'. However, members of these communities themselves did not contribute as considerably as in the previous case.
- Pages with greater presence in South America were those that suffered the greatest decline in number of fans.
Now, is this change as negative as it seems at first sight?
Facebook says that even though a decrease is observed in the number of 'likes', the value of these remaining ‘likes’ will increase considerably and companies can know their audience in a much more real way, while it will increase the scope of their Marketing actions.
In our case, we found that in the end, although the number of followers is reduced, the scope has been maintained and the number of visits has increased. Also, the impact of publications and interactions within these communities is much more representative and of quality.
In conclusion, competition in the field of online marketing increases exponentially and it is increasingly difficult to reach more users with fewer resources. That is why we must continually optimize, and the key to this process is performance measurement.
You must see this decision by Facebook not as a setback but, those dormant accounts disappear from the counts of followers, and in case they reactivate they will be reincorporated, preventing further distortion in our data. Knowing for certain who your target audience is will allow us to focus on this more directly, as this data will be updated with people who use the page content actively.
