Facebook will be removing inactive accounts starting next week for two primary reasons: Business Results & Consistency.
This step that will probably result in Page owners seeing a drop in likes, according to the blog they posted this morning.
“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,” the blog said. “This change ensures that data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date.”
Facebook said this move will improve business results, giving “businesses up-to-date insights on the people who actively follow their Page and [making] it easier for businesses to find people like their followers through tools like lookalike audiences.”
And also, increased consistency: “We already filter out likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from individual Page posts, so this update keeps data consistent.”
At the same time, the company also wants to make business results consistent with individual users’ experiences. Facebook said it already filters out “likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from individual Page posts.”
The social network wrote that Page administrators should “expect to see a small dip in their number of Page likes as a result of this update. It’s important to remember, though, that these removed likes represent people who were already inactive on Facebook.”
If deactivated accounts are reactivated, any likes coming from those accounts will be re-added to a Page’s like count.