Why I deleted 1500 Facebook fans

I deleted 1,500 fans from my Facebook page.

It was scary.

It took forever.

But it was so worth it!

Before we get into the why I deleted people, let me show you how I did it.

You can see the profile of everyone who likes your blog page from Facebook page settings.

When you are logged in to your page go to settings in the top right corner.

It will take you to a new page and there’s a toolbar on your left. From there click “people and pages” and you’ll see a list of every single person who likes your page.

What I had to do next was go through each person, clicking on their profile to see what I would find there. Some were obviously spam without clicking, but others were sneakier.

Tip: be sure to right click (or command click on a mac) to open each profile in a new tab. If you accidentally open one in the same window you will have to scroll all the way back through the list of names to find your place again. For this reason I also recommend blocking out a decent amount of time and doing all your deleting in one sitting.

Since I have an older page, I had people who liked and interacted with my page years ago, but their profile picture was from sometime in 2012 and it was obvious they hadn’t been on Facebook for a few years. . . Delete!

Other people had their profile filled with shares for various sweepstakes. This is a full-on spam account. But in order to make it not seem like they are spamming and entering contests that go against FB terms of service, they’ll also turn their sites to pages like yours and mine and “like” us right along with their spammy contests. Typically these people have separate accounts, one for spam and one for contests. Which means we are being liked by people who have no interest in our pages and who are not even on long enough to see what we post… delete!

Although they increase the number of likes we have, all of these accounts are hurting our Facebook pages.

This is because of how Facebook has set up their algorithm with how pages are promoted. What they do is, when you post a status update to your page, they show it to a select few of your fans as a test group. Based off of how those fans interact with what you have posted, they show it to more and more. If you have a bunch of fans that only get on FB once in awhile, only liked your page so they could enter another sweepstakes or via a “click farm” then you are out of luck! Those “fans” won’t be liking/commenting/clicking on any of your posts, which will make FB think what you are sharing isn’t any good.

I ended up having around 1,500 fans that weren’t really fans at all on my page. I kicked them off, and it freaked FB out for about 3 days. I’m guessing from Facebook’s perspective it looked like 1,500 people suddenly decided they hated me. It took about 3 days for things to go back to normal…except it was a new higher-than-before normal as I watched my reach go up!

I did this a few months ago and haven’t talked about it much until now, because I wanted to be sure it didn’t backfire on me later. It hasn’t for me, but since this is Facebook we are talking about I urge you to delete at your own risk! Different strategies work for different pages. If you do delete, I’d love to hear your experience!

I’m trying some other new strategies this month and I’ll be sure to let you know if I figure anything else out! But this was one I’ve seen success with on my own page for a couple months now, so I had to share!

Before we go, let’s go back to the “click farms” I mentioned earlier. While I could break it down for you here, I really enjoyed this video from veritasm. He did some fascinating experiments, and shows you exactly how click farms work and why you get fake accounts liking your page even when everything you do is on the up and up.

So… have you deleted any fans lately? Do you plan to?