This is going to be one of the more interesting – and welcome – developments regarding Facebook in a long while. On March 12 the billion dollar social media platform will ‘purge’ brand pages from inactive likes; this basically means that all the likes that are bought will disappear from like counts.
Social media have been struggling with the negative developments of accounts buying likes or followers through external clickfarms. These vast clickfarms usually operate from third world countries and have the sole task of increasing the amount of likes or followers of a brand or artist page in return for a fixed amount of money per new like. In turn, these new likes actually contribute nothing to the amount of comments, shares and likes on actual posts made by the brand or artist behind the page, as the likes/followers will probably never visit the social media page in question again.
Facebook made the following statement on their decision:
“We’ve recently updated the way we measure how many people like your Page. Pages may see a decrease in likes after March 12, when we [have] removed likes from inactive Facebook accounts.”
Instagram already purged its accounts a while back, notoriously shrinking the follower count of Justing Bieber by 3.5 million. We’ve already made some screenshots of DJ’s and other artists’ pages that have huge numbers of page likes that just seem to good to be true. If there are any significant decreases after the 12th of March, expect a follow-up on this news.
