Some app marketers think that more Likes on their Facebook Page is better because it looks more impressive to new potential customers and it means that you are reaching more people. Having hundreds or even thousands of followers can also give you a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Since you are reading this blog, you know that App Store Optimization is a lower cost way to get more downloads of your app. When done properly, social media can also be a low cost lead generator.
When it comes to Facebook however, more followers can actually be a bad thing. This post will show you exactly why this is the case and how to remove Likes from Facebook Pages to increase the effectiveness of your app marketing.
It’s Not Only About The Money
Some businesses have complained that Facebook is getting too greedy and is reducing the frequency that Page posts appear in follower’s News Feeds, in order to increase ad revenue.
While Facebook does want to increase their revenue, they actually have a bigger problem when it comes to displaying content. With over a billion active users worldwide, that is a lot of potential content.
According to Facebook, the typical user has about 1,500 stories that could show up in a person’s News Feed on every visit. Since that is way more than anyone will ever see, they need to have a way to display the most interesting information first.
How Facebook Determines What Is Displayed
To figure out which posts would be most interesting to an individual, Facebook has an algorithm that scores each potential post and displays the content with the best scores first.
This algorithm used to be called EdgeRank and had three components:
- (User) Affinity – How likely a user will be to be interested a piece of content, based on their current interests and actions
- (Content) Weight – How valuable is the content? For example, a comment would have more weight than a Like and is thus more likely to be displayed.
- (Time) Decay – Recent posts are scored higher than older posts.
While this basic structure is still in place, Facebook stopped calling it EdgeRank and now, more generically, calls it the News Feed ranking algorithm. There are also over 100,000 factors that go into scoring each individual piece of potential display content, instead of just three.
Engagement Is The Key
There is one more thing that wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the previous section: engagement. When a person likes one of your posts or leaves a comment, they not only show their affinity for posts like yours, but that interaction can bump your post up in the News Feed of others that are close to them and have similar interests.
Stories with more likes or comments can get moved up to the top of a News Feed even though it may have been ranked much lower the first time. The same goes with stories that are related to the last 50 actions that a person has taken.
This means that you need to be creating content that people like and will comment on, in order for your posts to be seen as more interesting and to get displayed more often. A more engaged audience also helps when you run paid ads to your followers.
So if you have 300 followers, but are able to reach 100 people with most of your posts because they are very engaging, that is far better than having 3,000 followers and only reaching 10 people because of low engagement. Poor audience engagement can also be a result of fake followers, assuming that you post interesting content on a regular basis and interact with your followers.
Fake Followers You Didn’t Ask For
This then brings up the topic of buying Facebook Likes. You obviously shouldn’t do it because it lowers the engagement with your posts and therefore will be seen by fewer real people.
Fake accounts don’t engage.
But you can also get fake likes organically. People who set up fake Facebook accounts to use in these “Like farms” will try to make their account look as real as possible to try to fool Facebook spam algorithms. Therefore, they will randomly like a bunch of pages so a ton of fake profiles aren’t all liking the same pages.
So how do you combat this? Manually remove those fake Likes from your app’s Facebook Page.
How To Remove Likes From Facebook Pages
Log into Facebook and go to a Page that you are an Admin for. Click on the Settings tab at the top of the screen and click on the Banned Users menu item on the left.
Then you will see a button for a drop down menu that defaults to Banned. Click on the button and select People Who Like This.
Next, you will see a list of people who like your page. Click on the gear to the right of each profile you want to remove and select Remove. The only two options are: Remove and Make Admin, so be careful to choose the right person and option, both are pretty extreme choices.
The next window will verify your choice and you can ban the person permanently by checking the box. If you are sure that the follower is a fake account, you should ban them permanently to save you the trouble of them Liking your page again. You can always add them back, if they are a real person and contact you personally.
What To Look For
If you look at enough Facebook accounts, you can tell which accounts are real and which are fake. But if you are just getting started, there are a few telltale signs:
- An profile picture that could be of anyone or looks like it was purchased from a stock photo site
- Only a few posts, usually of random pictures
- If they aren’t even trying, they won’t have any posts or pictures
- From a country that is notorious for Like farms, generally India or China, but fake Likes can come from anywhere and they could obviously be lying about their location.
The Downside
If you have a small audience, with only a couple of hundred Likes, then going through all of them is pretty easy. But if you have thousands of Likes, then it will take a lot of time to get rid of the fakes. In this case, hiring someone on a site like Elance can help you sort through your followers for a very reasonable price.
There is also the risk that you could remove real people who are actively sharing and commenting on your content. So before you start pruning your followers, go through your old posts and see who has contributed in the past.
Conclusion
That is how you can remove Likes from your Facebook page, thereby giving your content a better chance of reaching real people. You can also change other options in the General menu of your Page Settings. Restricting viewing to certain countries can be another way that you prevent fake Likes.
We hope that this has been helpful and you can use it to improve the quality of your Page followers. On Facebook, quality trumps quantity…and that is how it should be. So be sure to post quality content, engage and curate the quality of your followers.
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