Facebook warned everyone about an upcoming drop in page likes earlier this month, which ended up taking place on March 11th. By removing inactive accounts from a page’s total like count, Facebook claims its making the overall total of page likes more meaningful.
Understandably, many business owners were upset to wake up that morning to find their hard earned page likes had suddenly dropped. I’ll wager that however many likes your business page lost, it’s nothing compared to the drop incurred by the top losers.
Big brands and celebrities were hit hardest — which makes sense, they have the most likes so they also have the most to lose. However, it’s alarming just how many of their total likes were made up of inactive accounts, almost 10% in some cases.
Thanks to a study by social media analytics platform CrowdTingle we know exactly who the biggest losers were and how much they lost. CrowdTingle compiled this data by tacking over 80,000 pages starting March 11th.
Top Celebrity Losers
- Rihanna: –7,986,973 (9.8% of likes)
- Shakira: –6,855,640 (6.8% of likes)
- Katy Perry: –5,632,634 (7.8% of likes)
- Lady Gaga: –5,470,021 (8.9% of likes)
- Michael Jackson: –5,063,200 (6.7% of likes)
- Beyoncé: –4,937,853 (7.9% of likes)
- Lil Wayne: –4,817,374 (9.3% of likes)
- AKON: –4,615,180 (8.7% of likes)
- Selena Gomez: –4,540,000 (8.0% of likes)
- Avril Lavigne: –4,417,463 (8.3% of likes)
Top Big Brand Losers
- YouTube: –5,796,122 (7.2% of likes)
- Coca-Cola: –5,000,475 (5.6% of likes)
- MTV: –4,064,977 (8.5% of likes)
- Texas HoldEm Poker: –3,719,075 (5.5% of likes)
- Disney: –3,467,508 (7.4% of likes)
- Converse: –3,207,291 (8.5% of likes)
- Red Bull: –3,197,328 (7.5% of likes)
- Oreo: –2,621,539 (6.6% of likes)
- Starbucks: –2,489,603 (7.0% of likes)
- Skype: –2,430,956 (8.0% of likes)
Since Facebook removed likes from accounts that had been either memorialized or intentionally activated, it’s safe to assume that some percentage of the lost likes were from people who simply chose to leave Facebook.
What does it mean when millions of once-active choose to leave the network altogether? I’m not sure, but this data tells an interesting story.
