Do you want to get rid of fake Facebook fans on your page? Do you need to know how to find and remove them? You may have attracted fake Facebook fans without even realizing it, and those fans may be damaging your position in the news feed. In this week, we will show you how to sniff out those fake Facebook fans and ban them from your page.
In April 2014 Facebook announced an update to their news feed algorithm that challenged Facebook page admins to improve their marketing efforts. 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. You may end up with 50,000 Facebook fans, but if 25,000 of them are fake, Facebook has probably already penalized you. A few ways you can end up with fake fans are buying fans not targeting giveaways or ads and even creating viral content.
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.
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. 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 but you can find just about every single fan using this method.
Open a new tab to use Social Graph. Simply type "Fans of" in the search box and you'll get a list of your current Facebook fans. This is the full list of your fans. You can narrow the search results using the search filter on the right side or by typing the filter into the search bar. We 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.