A few weeks ago Facebook made a change to the way people interact with Facebook fan pages. For all the gritty details there are a couple posts you can read here and here.

But basically…  (and this is oversimplifying it greatly) they changed from having people “Become a Fan” of your page or business to having them now say they “Like” your page. Seems like a small change that should not have much of an effect on the amount of people taking the action, or at least it would seem.

Facebook changed forever on April 19, 2010

But my own stats for one of my Facebook pages tells a different story. I’m sure Facebook tested this concept before rolling it out across the entire site and all their widgets. You would think there’s no way they would make a change like this and testing it to make sure there were no ill effects.*

The graphic below shows you stats for one of my Facebook pages which shows how many people visited and how many people “Became a Fan” of my page. For the couple weeks leading up to April 19th, you can see things are pretty consistent. But look what happens right after the 19th. Both visits to the page and the amount of those visitors now “Liking” the page drop significantly. I should note that absolutely no other site changes were made, and site traffic stayed consistent.

facebook Like button stats

Big difference huh? I’ll keep my eye on the numbers over the next couple weeks to see if this persists. If it does, I’d say the “Like” button is a colossal disaster for both Facebook and fan page owners.

Maybe its just taking some time for people to get used to the change. They’ve seen “Become a Fan” buttons all over the place for years and now they see “Like” and aren’t sure what to make of it.

Or maybe its the demographic that my site/fan page is targeting. They tend to be a little older (50+) and maybe the new “Like” feature does not jive with them. Who knows.

Curious though if anybody else has experienced this sudden drop in “fans” or “likes” on their facebook fan page.

* I don’t think Facebook would do this purposely, but…

What if page owners who are not “liking” the drop in fans decide to spend money promoting their pages on Facebook? Could be some big profit in that for Facebook, no? I have to think this would cause more harm to Facebook than the profit would justify though.