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How Not To Lose 5000 Facebook Likes

This post basically highlights how much an idiot I am but it’s well worth posting so as you don’t make the same mistake that I did today. With one simple click of a button I managed to lose nearly 5000 likes and after about 20 minutes of panic I managed to figure out what I had done not before having a mild heart attack. It’s an obvious mistake in hindsight but one that you should avoid at all costs…

Be careful Of Multiple Accounts

I was actually giving a Facebook training course (the irony I know) and as you all probably know you can now log in to Facebook using your page instead of a personal account. It’s very easy to flick between multiple accounts and although not an issue for most it can be hard to remember which account you are logged in to! Something similar to multiple accounts on Tweetdeck and the errors you can easily make there. If you manage clients for people for example be very careful as it’s easy to forget who you are logged in as!

Changing Restrictions

I was giving a little demo of how you could change the restrictions on a page and limit the page to people of certain ages, languages and locations. This is a fairly normal thing for people to do especially for people looking to hide content from minors or with pages in different territories. I changed ours to over 18s only and restricted a couple of countries to show how alcohol companies need to respect age on Facebook pages.

Irreversible Change

You are of course greeted with a pop up to confirm if confirm that you are changing the age restrictions and that doing so will mean you lose all the people who fall in to the bracket. Any normal person would click no and leave the page as it was but being in a training environment with lots going on I just clicked ok. With the amount of pop ups and stuff that you have to allow on Facebook it’s an easy mistake to make and you could lose a huge percentage of your likes with one click of a button.

Can You Reverse It?

The simple answer is no. Once you change that age restriction those likes are gone forever. It’s very annoying because it means you pretty much can’t change access to your page without losing people who fall within that category. Of course most people won’t make this mistake but you can see how the odd idiot like me could lose 5000 likes in the click of a button. I’m off to make a phone call to Facebook with tail between my legs :)

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