From time to time, our website will have a very large social property for sale that hasn’t been used for a while. Despite a large number of fans, these properties just don’t have the activity, mainly because the previous owners did no longer care for them, or they simply lost interest. When you own a large social property such as a Facebook fanpage or an Instagram account, it is advised to keep the fans happy by providing fresh, daily content. Old and abandoned pages slip into the oblivion of inactivity, and many fans simply forgot that they ever followed/liked such a page or account. In most cases, the activity can be jump-started, providing that the new owner knows what he/she is doing. However, once you start frequently posting to a once dormant social property, be prepared to endure a minuscule loss of fans or followers.
So why does this happen? Are the followers fake? Are they not liking the new content you’re providing? No. The answer is much simpler than that. Many fans simply liked/followed a particular page out of impulsiveness, only to later forget about it. Take Facebook fanpages for example, many (if not most) people liked and followed a particular fanpage simply thanks to its title. The countless “Hey I love you, LOL J/K make me a sandwich” type of fanpages lured followers in with snappy one-liners, and most of these pages never provided any content. Naturally, if you start posting daily content to a page/account that was dormant for years (and many of these accounts didn’t receive a single status update since 2009) you will make some people angry, thus making them leave. We all know how intrusive content creators are these days, bombarding our news feeds with daily clickbait type of articles and videos. Many people are sick of having their walls/news feed’s spammed to death, so they will instinctively remove/delete/unfollow any old page or account that they believe will flood them with too much content.
In conclusion, the loss of fans/followers on newly obtained properties is a natural process of how things go in this business. Some fans simply forgot they followed such pages/accounts, and the fresh posts reminded them to leave. The good news is that the loss of fans is usually small, and the drop of followers stays within 3-6%. That number may be higher if you’re planning to rebrand your newly purchased property, as discussed in this article. In most cases, things go over smoothly, and the majority of fans/followers will stick around and interact with your content.