Starting March 12th, Page Admins will have slightly more accurate like-counts!

https://www.facebook.com/business/news/page-likes-update   This is great news for everyone here who actively wants to stay informed of everything going on in my writing world! 

The problem works like this:  People engage in "like fests" where they run around "liking" as many pages as they can, thinking it will boost visibility of those pages for their owners.  You can actually pay people on Fiver, Gigbucks and other freelance sites to get you 1000 likes or 5000 likes. 

What this does in actuality, is HURT the page owner's ability to reach the fans who honestly clicked "like" because they truly enjoy the page admin's content. 

Artificially-inflated like counts can also occur when FB users deactivate their accounts or their account is memorialized because they died.  Up until recently, those page likes did not get removed, creating bloat that had the same negative impact on content getting to fans. 

The more like bloat on a page, the less likely content will be seen by those who care.  FB is taking steps to assist page owners with this problem by removing likes from deactivated and memorialized accounts.  THIS IS  A GOOD THING!!!  Many people forget about the pages they've liked when they go to deactivate their personal profile.  So this will help keep like counts a bit more accurate for page admins and help just a little bit more in ensuring that those of you who WANT to see content, will actually see it.

In the meantime, don't forget about the pages feed in the left-hand sidebar of your personal profile's newsfeed. (the view you get when you click 'home'.  While that feed can't be sorted unfortunately, spending a few minutes on it every day will help pages you've liked get their content to you more easily.  The more you interact, the more often that content will begin showing up directly on your wall as well.

I created a short video to help people discover and use this feature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edZwJYwiPF4&list=PLsfmoQFz615rP2RFiCW-ZOO6-zkcK_9UL

There isn't much we can do yet about inactive fans who engaged in "like fests" with no intention of keeping up with the page, but FB's move will help.