Facebook's Great Purge came to a close last week, and many brands experienced precipitous drops in total likes as the social network removed deactivated or memorialized Facebook pages from counts. So what was the final damage to the follower counts of hotels and resorts?
The biggest drops occurred for those pages with the least number of likes, according to analysis by Ryan Solutions that looked at changes to 9,000 hotel and resort brand Facebook pages between March 10 and March 23.
The average across all pages was about a 2.7% loss.
Those pages under one thousand likes saw nearly 4% of their likes wiped out while those larger than one thousand generally saw around 2% fewer likes by the end of the purge. While this isn't an enormous amount for the larger pages, it does indeed affect the smaller sized accounts more significantly.
When Instagram carried out a similar purge late last year, the opposite held true: the larger pages were affected the most, with drops of around 3% points.
Of course, it's important to remember that quality counts. The idea of having likes with no chance of being active or engaging with published content is not an exciting one, even if the like count does have some basic human popualrity appeal.
Brand marketers want followers to like, comment and share content because that signals to Facebook's algorithm that the content is engaging. This in turn boosts the content on other user feeds, as Facebook is incentivized by both users and businesses to only serve the most compelling relevant content throughout its platform.
Anecdotally, the People Talking About This metric has also risen slightly among this group, so this is good news overall. It may just be a bitter pill for some who have been working hard building their follower base.
NB: Lost image courtesy Shutterstock.