If you woke up this morning and found that your Facebook fan or business Page was suddenly missing a whole lotta Likes, you’re in good company. The list of Facebook users who saw quintuple-digit drops in Likes includes Lady GaGa (down 31,738 Likes), Justin Beiber (down 17, 980) and Xynga’s Texas Hold’em page (down around 96,000 Likes). No, it wasn’t another Facebook glitch. It was the social media giant finally getting around to doing something it promised to do at the end of last month – start cracking down on fake Likes and fake Users.
Facebook posted an announcement of its intent to do the cleanup on its blog on August 31, but little seemed to happen other than a small burst of people reporting on Facebook’s intentions. Most agreed that the move was necessary if Facebook were to have any kind of integrity as an advertising platform. After all, why would anyone use the new Facebook ad platform without a guarantee that the majority of page likes and users were actual legitimate users?
While fake Facebook accounts, phantom users and fake Likes are against the site’s terms of service, it’s a generally well-known secret that they exist. In fact, back in May, a writer for PC World named off about a dozen Facebook pages that he had watched explode with thousands of Likes literally overnight – as in, one fan one day and 5,000 to 10,000 within 24 hours. Dan Tynan poked around a bit, and found a piece of software for sale for $50. When activated, the bot software logs into a fake account on Facebook, finds the page you want to boost, logs out and logs into another fake account. He downloaded a free two-day trial version, bought $100 of fake Facebook accounts from a website that operates openly and clicked himself up a fresh 100 new Likes on his page.
No one was shocked to learn how easy it is to buy and use fake Facebook accounts and artificially boost the numbers of Likes for a page. As noted, it’s a pretty well-known black hat social media trick. Facebook has been using automated software to track and delete these fake Facebook accounts for some time, but many of the bot programs have built-in settings that allow them to evade detection by the site’s automated nanny-sitters.
Apparently, Facebook has spruced up their automated detection programs because this latest sweep swept away hundreds of thousands of user accounts and all of the Likes that went along with them. But it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. As a company representative pointed out, those high-digit losses suffered by pages like Zynga and Lady GaGa’s fan page actually account for less than 1 percent of the respective likes that each of the pages has. Overall, though, Facebook acknowledged early in August that the company believes close to 9 percent of its users are fake accounts – accounts started by businesses that should actually be pages as well as out-and-out fraudulent accounts started for the sole purpose of being used in botnets to either click on ads or drive up Likes on pages.
In an article on posted at TechCrunch, Josh Constine noted that the cleanup of fake accounts has a lot of potentially beneficial effects for page owners. Among other things, he points out, if your page numbers are overinflated with fake accounts, it’s a lot harder to do accurate analytics and figure out which types of posts are actually resonating with your true fans and customers.
With a rally in stock price last week and the evidence of security tightening by Facebook, the huge social media company may just be heading for brighter days ahead. And that’s something Facebook is counting on, as they prepare to launch a new Gifts service, where Facebook users can purchase and send real gifts to their online friends through Facebook—just in time for the upcoming holidays.