How to Remove Fake Facebook Fans

Why Fake Facebook Fans Are a Big Deal

In April 2014 Facebook announced an update to their news feed algorithm that challenged Facebook page admins to improve their marketing efforts.

Find out how you can remove fake Facebook fans from your Page.

The bottom line? Pages with higher engagement and quality content are rewarded with greater visibility in the news feed, while pages with limited fan engagement and poor content lose positioning in the news feed.

What does this mean for you? If you have fake Facebook fans, they aren’t engaging with your content, and that is likely hurting your news feed visibility—there’s a good chance your real fans aren’t seeing your updates.

Buying likes is a sure way to end up with fake Facebook fans.

A few ways you can end up with fake fans—intentionally or unintentionally—are buying fans, not targeting giveaways or ads and even creating viral content. You may end up with 50,000 Facebook fans, but if 25,000 of them are fake, Facebook has probably already penalized you.

#1: Decide if it’s Worth the Effort

Ultimately, you want to remove fake Facebook fans and avoid the Facebook penalties. You have a few choices: remove the fake accounts, transfer your brand to a new Facebook page or simply ignore the fake accounts.

Depending on the number of fans you have, finding and removing fakes can be daunting—especially if you have thousands upon thousands of fans.

My rule of thumb: If your page is performing well and your posts are appearing in the news feed, don’t stress about the fake fans right now. If you have 50,000 fans and only a small percentage is fake, it might be best to ignore them.

However, if you have noticed poor reach and limited engagement, it’s time to make a change. Whether you have 50 fans or 50,000, you need to find, remove and ban the fake users.

#2: Find Fake Fans

Go to your Facebook page and click the Fans icon and select See All. The list you see only shows you up to 500 fans. If you see any fake accounts within this list of 500, click the gear next to the name and select Remove.

You can find fake fans via your page.

If you don’t see any fake fans or have coasted past the 500-fan mark and need to see a longer list, you’ll need to use Facebook’s Social Graph. Finding fans via Social Graph is extremely tedious and time-consuming (I recommend giving this task to an intern), but you can find just about every single fan using this method.

Open a new tab to use Social Graph (keep your page tab open as well). Simplytype “Fans of (insert page name)” in the search box and you’ll get a list of your current Facebook fans. As far as I can tell, this is the full list of your fans.

You can narrow the search results using the search filters on the right side or by typing the filter into the search bar (as in the example below).

Use Social Graph to find even more fake fans.

I suggest filtering the list by geographic location first to weed out potentially fake fans from countries with the highest number of fake accounts (Chile, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Brazil and the Philippines, according to Business Insider).

When you find a fake account, the simplest task is to report the spam account to Facebook. Click the arrow in the upper-right corner of the account result and select Report.

Filter your Social Graph results by location.

Of course, if you’ve tried to report someone before, you know that Facebook is slow to respond, if they take notice at all.

#3: Ban Fake Accounts for Good

This method requires a little more work on your part. You’re going to find the fake user’s Facebook ID and use it to replace one piece of code behind the scenes. Don’t worry, though, I’m confident you can do this.

Go back to the open Social Graph tab. Find the fake account you want to remove within the Social Graph and open up that fake user’s profile. At this point you should have two tabs open: the fake user profile and See All fans.

Now you need to find the user’s ID. Copy the profile’s URL then go to http://findmyfacebookid.com/ and paste the link into the box. The number you get back is the ID you will use to ban this fake account from your page. Copy the ID and go back to your See All fans tab.

In Google Chrome or Firefox right-click the gear next to the user and choose Inspect Element.

Use the Inspect Element feature.

A box will pop up with programming language and one line will be highlighted.

Find the highlighted line.

Right-click the highlighted line and select Edit as HTML.

Choose Edit as HTML so you can change the ID.

Select the user ID from within the coding box and paste the fake account’s user ID to replace the original one. Click on the coding box grey border to save the new user ID.

Switch out the IDs.

Head back to the People Who Like This tab and select Remove under the Settings arrow. A pop-up box will appear asking you if you would like to ban the fake account. Make sure it uses the fake account’s name. Select Ban Permanently,Confirm and you’re done!

To confirm that you have in fact removed the fake account, go back into the People Who Like This box and click the top menu. Select Banned and you should see the removed user.

Check to make sure the user is banned from your page.

If you’re looking to clean up your Facebook page without completely starting over, this is the workaround that can help you out.

Conclusion

A page with thousands of Facebook fans might make a powerful first impression, but if those fans aren’t interacting with updates, that page will have a horrible time positioning itself impressively in the news feed.

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Facebook Cleaning Up Its News Feed By Reducing Like-Baiting And Spammy Posts

Bad news for spammers and like baiting sites on Facebook, the company is on a house cleaning mode. To make its news feed more engaging so that users spend more time, Facebook is performing a series of improvements to its News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently report as spammy and that they don’t want to see.

Facebook states that, “The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important and relevant to them.”

Improvements to the Facebook News Feed would mean wielding its axe on “Like-baiting”, frequently circulated content and spammy Links.

“Like-baiting” posts which explicitly ask News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive, will henceforth be detected by Facebook and won’t be shown on the News Feed.

Facebook states that: “When we survey people and ask them to rate the quality of these stories, they report that like-baiting stories are, on average, 15% less relevant than other stories with a comparable number of likes, comments and shares.”

However, recent update will not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans.

Stories from Pages that would be repeated again and again by pages will also be de-emphasized from News Feed. Besides stories in News Feed that use inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads will also be impacted by the new changes.

Facebook informs that, “The update we are making today improves News Feed to reduce cases of these spammy links, and in our early testing we’ve seen a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook – this is a big increase in the context of News Feed and is a good sign that people are finding the remaining content in their News Feed more relevant and trustworthy.”

Facebook has been working for some time now to make its News Feed more engaging to hold its users on its platform. Spam on Facebook has become a nuisance. Last year Facebook along with YouTube were reported to be the networks most infested by spam. This is a sensible move from the social networking giant which is struggling to stop users, specially the teens, from moving out to spend time on other networks.

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Facebook News Feed Updates: How Marketers Should Respond to Story Bump

What is Story Bump?

Facebook announced that they’ve tweaked their algorithm known as EdgeRank to allow stories that are getting more engagement (more likes, comments and shares) to be bumped up in the news feed.

The change is called Story Bumping and has already rolled out to 99% of desktop users and is still being tweaked for mobile users. The Story Bump shows you posts you may not have seen when they were first published.

For example, say you log into Facebook and scroll through your news feed to view 50 posts. The post you miss at position 51 continues to get lots of likes, comments and shares. Four hours later, you check Facebook and that post is at the top of your news feed, even though it’s four hours old.

Stories can get bumped up higher depending on several factors.

The Story Bump is good news for Facebook marketers for several reasons. In tests done by Facebook, there was an 8% increase in likes, comments and shares on stories posted by pages.

The other good news Facebook revealed is they’re going to be more transparent about changes and post them on their Facebook for Business News area. Notice there’s a category tag for posts about the news feed, so bookmark this site.

Let’s dive into the basics of the Facebook news feed and learn more about how to take advantage of the Story Bump with these four tips.

#1: Not Everyone Sees Every Post in Their News Feed

Facebook states the average person has the potential to see over 1500 posts every day. Their job is to help you see the most interesting things.

They do this by watching your behavior and then showing you more of the things they think you want to see. Facebook has stated the things that affect their algorithm are:

• How often you interact with the friend, page or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted
• The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular
• How much you’ve interacted with this type of post in the past
• Whether you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post

To make sure you see posts from certain people or pages, you’ll need to create a Facebook Interest List. Just like on Twitter, people create lists to keep track of the people they find most interesting on Facebook.

You can also encourage your fans to create interest lists that include your page. They get notifications about your page by clicking on the Liked button under the right side of your cover photo and selecting Get Notifications. This is where you can add the page to interest lists.

Encourage your fans to create interest lists or get notifications from your page.

Facebook page posts also seem to have disappeared from the Facebook ticker. I’m not sure how many people interact with posts using the ticker and it’s going away with the updated news feed rolling out soon.

#2: Story Bumping Helps the Shelf Life of Your Posts

A recent study by Wisemetrics showed that it only takes 2 hours and 30 minutes for a post to get 75% of its total impressions and less than 2 hours to get 75% of its maximum reach. So you have a very short window of time to get engagement.

With Story Bumping, your story jumps back up in the news feed if it gets good engagement.

Without Story Bumping, your post gets 75% of its reach in less than 2 hours.

#3: Engagement Continues to Be Key

I’m sure by now everyone is tired of the “E word,” but it’s more important than ever. How do you increase your Facebook engagement? Be remarkable. Be interesting. Don’t be boring.

The great thing about the new Facebook Insights is they show you exactly which posts are the most engaging, so you can model those types of posts more often.

To get to the engagement rate on each post, go to Insights, select Posts and then choose Engagement Rate from the drop-down menu.

Look at the engagement rate on each post.

The best thing about this statistic is that it factors in how many people actually saw your post, so you get a true measure of engagement.

Watch your most interesting posts and analyze what worked.

#4: Facebook Page Post Ads Provide an Extra Boost

You can be very effective on Facebook without spending money by focusing on engagement, but you can go farther by spending a little money from time to time.

To take advantage of the Story Bump, advertise your individual posts so they get more engagement through the ad. This boosts the bump the post receives organically.

The Boost Post option has a very wide target if you select “People who like your page and their friends,” which may include a lot of people who have no interest in your Facebook page. If you select “People you choose through targeting” option, you can only target people by location, age, gender and language—not by keyword interests, which again may include a lot of people not interested in your Facebook page.

Do not use the Boost Post option for re-engaging your audience.

The better way to get more engagement on a post is to narrow your targeting by using the Facebook ads interface and selecting Promote Page Posts.

Select Promote Page Posts, then choose the post you want to promote in the drop-down menu.

Now in the Targeting section, you can choose to advertise your post to only your own fans or use the Precise Interests area to target the post to people who would be more inclined to like your page and interact with your post.

Choose to advertise to your own fans to re-engage your audience.

The Facebook ads interface also allows you to precisely control your budget and get more for your money. As with any money you spend on marketing, track your results and do your testing. To really go for more engagement, only advertise posts that are interesting and already getting some engagement organicallyso you know they interest others.

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Facebook's Re-Design: How Will You Be Fed?

Facebook launched its new design today with an introduction from Mark Zuckerberg that this was the "best personalized newspaper” for the world. Well, I worked in the newspaper business, sir, and this is no newspaper.  It’s a better “user experience” than a newspaper’s, but it's also worse.

Happily, in addition to a much-improved web experience that more closely mirrors the desktop, Facebook will now separate for you the feeds that you get from say, Social Media Today, and other content providers, celebrities, and fan pages, from your friend feeds, so that you can more clearly distinguish the two.  But wasn’t that friend validity what you went to Facebook for?  You’ll get terrific social visibility into what and whom friends are sharing on your content feed, but it’s not clear how that will translate to the mobile device. Pinterest got a boost, with new third-party app support (as if Pinterest needed it).

But is this a newspaper? Newspapers were clearly simpler and actually helped you to focus your thinking, not drill it down. Regardless of whether you agreed with its point of view, you could rely on its authority.  While Facebook seems to be bending towards a better sort of authority than its murky prior algorithm, it’s still not clear, other than “most popular,” what content posts will be provided. All, as one presenter said? Or most popular, as another said?

As reported ahead of time, images are much bigger and will be clearer and more dramatic. Albums will be improved, but I didn’t catch that detail. In fact, I was dumped by the Mashable/LiveStream server before the end of the presentation, which leaves me with the most important question around the newspaper/not a newspaper issue: what will happen to the ads? Ads on mobile are extremely tricky. And nearly useless. But ads are what drove the independence and quality of newspapers for a couple of hundred years.

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Facebook Dramatically Improves News Feed

According to Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook is trying to give everyone in the world the best possible personal newspaper. It should have high quality content from renowned sources, as well as what your friends and family are saying. It should be visual, rich and engaging. Now, almost 50% of the average news feed is photos and visual content. Page posts from businesses now comprises over 25%. This new News Feed design reflects this evolving face of news, and encompasses three main areas: Rich Stories, Choice of Feeds and Mobile Consistency.

Rich Stories

The goal of the redesign was to make our stories shine, and reduce the clutter that was impacting story delivery. In the new Facebook redesign, photos are larger and higher quality. Photo albums are similarly improved.

When posting linked articles, the image thumbnail is much larger, the title is more prominent, and descriptions are longer. Additionally, the logo of the publisher is now included in the lower right corner of article summaries.

Profile images are now larger, and the cover photo area now includes how many mutual friends you have.

Place check-ins include a detailed map, location image and details about that place.

Third-party applications like Pinterest and Instagramthat get shared to Facebook now receive better treatment and more focus.

Shared articles and videos now look fantastic. Not only is the content of the story larger and more stunning, instead of a small piece of text saying who has shared it, you will actually see thumbnail images for your friends down the ice of the story if they've shared that same article.

Events and stories shared from Pages are now included in Most Shared sections.

When you like a topic within your profile, not only will see you posts from that topic, you can now receive posts about that topic.

Choice of Feeds

Users may want to see different kinds of information, like music or photos. Now, there's a switcher at the top of the page that will let you change to different kinds of feeds.

All Friendswill show every single post from every single one of your friends in reverse chronological order, so you can make sure you haven't missed anything.

The Music Feed can show what your friends are listening to, what concerts are happening, or other news and information about your favorite musicians.

The Photos Feed will show all of the photos that your friends have posted.

The Following Feed is just for the Pages that you've liked. It will display every single post from the Pages and public figures that you like. It is in chronological order, and is not impacted by EdgeRank.

Close Friends and Games remain the same, and your Lists will also remain intact.

All of these feeds will be available on every platform, both desktop and mobile.

Mobile Consistency

For the first time, not only will the Facebook interface be consistent across all devices, the desktop display was actually inspired by the mobile version!

Navigation is now global. You will not have to go back to the Home page to get to another section of Facebook, as you did before.

The New Stories bubble is just one of many subtle changes and improvements that have been implemented across the board.

These changes will be rolled out on the web today. Mobile versions will be rolled out over the course of the next couple weeks. The changes will all be rolled out gradually to give increasingly larger groups of users a chance to see the changes and provide feedback. This is becoming the standard for Facebook implementations.

Businesses will want to make sure that, going forward, articles and images posted to Facebook are large enough to support the new format. Images previously uploaded will resize if they were originally larger. Facebook Page profile pics, typically your business logo, may also need to be resized.

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