Numbers game
How did Facebook’s purge of inactive accounts affect DJ’s page likes?
The 'big facebook purge' was the social media event everyone in marketing was talking about last month. We at TopDeejays grabbed the chance to look into how badly DJs (and their notoriously gigantic egos) got hurt.
Facebook decided to delete inactive accounts, or as they put it, "memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts" – the latter meaning users who have died. According to our data, the purge started on March 14, but we recorded the fattest drops (pun intended) between March 21 and 23.
We took a sample of superstar DJs, because we assumed their stats would be the most interesting to look at. The average loss was 3.635 per cent, but we haven't found a clear statistical correlation between the total number of Likes and drop percentage. Tiësto was the worst hit with 6.591 per cent of his Likes deleted, which is more than 10 times those R3hab lost. In terms of absolute numbers, David Guetta effectively "lost one whole R3hab", but he still dominates our all-time chart with a whopping 55.7m Likes. But as always, Deadmau5 is the weirdest one. His total sum of Likes is relatively low (under 10m), but he ranked almost top in terms of percentage lost in the purge. Hopefull that doesn't imply a higher mortality rate among Deadmau5 fans!
It would be no bad thing if Facebook decided to sweep spammers and fake accounts that are active only for buying purposes. But this is unlikely, because a lot of those fake users actually click on Facebook ads and act like regular users to avoid being banned. And DJs advertise a lot; they wouldn't be too happy to find out that the users they had paid for in advertising fees no longer exist. It could be that a proper purge of fake accounts could be more awkward for Facebook than for DJs...