Have you been experiencing a drop on your Facebook likes lately? Felt like your page is becoming unpopular? Worry not. Facebook is just implementing a security measure that prevents harm to the integrity of both their users and pages. It is true that this would reflect people dashing away from your page. Not real people though, but fake ones.

According to Facebook, these likes are “gained by means that violate our (their) terms.” This means that the likes are derived from accounts that are duplicated, compromised, or generated out of malware and bulk purchases. In other words – the likes are from fake accounts.

Why Clean Up Fake Facebook Accounts?

The clean up ultimately improves Facebook’s integrity for both the user and the brands because it gives the page an more accurate representation of its popularity. Fraudulent “likes” do not just affect the authenticity of marketing, but they also injure the budget allotted for REAL people. Who wants fake fans anyway?

A fraudulent “like” means nothing else except for that mere like. It does not generate sales, nor does it help in sharing or in advertising the brand or the page.

A real like (from a real person), on the other hand, reflects actual interest of a user to a particular brand or page. It also opens the door for interaction and 2-way communication between the brand and the user; therefore making the page work not just as a popularity measurement page but as a customer care portal as well. It is also a medium of sharing the brand to other people, making it a venue for digital “word of mouth,” courtesy of the REAL likers of the page. From the eyes of the advertisers, a real like is equivalent to a genuine customer, a potential for being long-term consumers by virtue of customer service engagement on a professional and personal level.

Imagine all those effects of a real like, not being materialized because of a fraudulent like. How horrible does it get? Not only will the fake likes prejudice the advertisers, but they also show a false-positive result for the company. Definitely not good.

Now What?

Now you know that you should not be alarmed when you see that your brand’s Facebook page likes are declining. That’s Facebook upgrading their security system, with all due concern to the welfare of your business and its genuine credibility.

Though it is similarly implied that this loss in numbers has become a pain for advertisers since they already spent a reasonable amount of money for both real and fake audience, the clean up is actually a start of a “convenient” clean slate, since the unnecessary numbers were in fact automatically cleared, without the advertisers having to manually “weed out the grass.”

Moving forward, it will be useful that all the fake numbers are getting deleted, however, it is important to note that this remedy is merely a treatment of the symptom. The major issue still remains that it is relatively effortless to create a duplicate or a fake account on Facebook, or even multiple ones, in order to repeat the cycle and cause false inflation. Analyzing this, it will be quite challenging for Facebook to make the ultimate solution, in a way that it strictly prevents fake accounts from being created, while at the same time openly lets real users create their Facebook account.

Get Hooked 360, Digital Marketing Agency Philippines