Facebook has been trying to make likes more meaningful by removing memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts from brands’ fan counts. After more than a week of watching these stats steadily decline, fan totals are once again growing at their normal pace. But how many fans did resorts and hotels lose along the way? Here’s the lowdown.
The Goods
Based on overall averages, the purge appeared to begin around March 12 and end on or before March 21. To account for a ramp up/down of Facebook efforts, we analyzed changes in the fan counts of 9,000 resort and hotel pages between March 10-23. We adjusted for each page’s average growth leading up to that period (to account for fans acquired during the purge) and grouped results by initial fan counts.
Results
On average, the resort and hotel pages we looked at lost about 2.7% of their fans during this purge. Pages that started with 25,000-50,000 fans saw the lowest drop (1.9%) while pages with 100-1,000 saw the largest (3.8%). This was nearly opposite of what we saw with the Instagram purge.
What This Means
In theory, if Facebook only removed fans that were completely inactive, even a large decrease in fan count should have no effect on engagement stats like Facebook’s “People Talking About This” (PTAT) metric.
Sure enough, not only did PTAT not drop, it actually rose slightly during the ~10 days that fan counts were steadily declining. Though not conclusive, it does serve as a small indication that active fans were indeed left untouched and these efforts seem to be accomplishing what they intended.
