Followers Decreasing? Worry Not, Here’s Why!

From time to time, Facebook purges inactive and fake accounts, or the person has passed away and their accounts have been moved to a memorial account. They aren’t removing the person’s accounts, just purging their likes, follows and other interactions.

Should We Be Worried?

January 2025 for Panhandle Scanner was a record month in many ways, some rather ironic. For one thing, the page reached a record number of views at 5.8 Million from a total reach of 198,855 unique accounts. That’s a record month, but so was the purge of 533 followers in January. Although we lost over 500, we also gained a healthy 1,141 new followers, so the page continues to grow as the most followed news source in the entire panhandle. We are not ‘losing followers’, we are pulling ahead of the competition at our normal pace of 1,000+ new followers for the 13th consecutive month.

Worry Not, Here’s Why

In an article written by Kristen Daukas, she states, “While many have been lamenting over how horrible this move is and that page numbers were going to drastically drop in size, the truth is that the average business page will not even notice.”

She continues…

Instead of being overly concerned about it, look at the good that will come from it:

1) Your insights are going to be more accurate.

2) The people that are on your page will actually be “real” people.

3) This gives you the opportunity to truly engage with your followers (content, content, content!).

If you’ve only been concerned about building big numbers, this is the perfect time to stop and instead, make quality your concern and focus. It is far more beneficial to your marketing message to have 100 engaged followers who truly care about your business and your message than it is to have 1,000 that never see or hear your content.

So trust us on this one… the big purge is actually a good thing for you and your page.

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We are thankful for the purge of fake or inactive accounts. In many ways we filter those out ourselves by banning dozens of suspect accounts that want to bring harm to us or just be a menace on social media. The more troublemakers we ban, the more our page grows in quality, and ironically in quantity as well. It’s a phenomenon that we cannot fully explain, but we will take Kristen’s advice and enjoy the organic result of the purge.