This warning may come a little late, but even if you knew earlier, this information wouldn’t save you. What are we talking about? The current Facebook Fanpage purge everybody is talking about. From time to time, Facebook goes all out and decides to “clean the house” from what they consider spam and low-quality content. This translates into thousands of deleted Fanpages (yes, we’ve said thousands). This semi-annual tradition always leaves Fanpage admins trembling in fear, as Facebook is taking no hostages and deleting pages left and right. People who have managed Fanpages for years are most likely used to this now, but they soon may find out that this is no ordinary purge. We took a few days to investigate things, and we have concluded that this Facebook cleanup is by far, the biggest attempt by Facebook to clean up their website.

What is Facebook targetting?

Like we have mentioned earlier, Facebook does this every year. They go after Fanpage admins who don’t abide by their rules and engage in excessive spam and/or adult/hateful content. But, this purge is different. It’s targeting more than what Facebook used to care about. Back in March 2018, Facebook updated their Fanpage policies, mainly their branded content policy. Some people were calling it “Doomsday March”, as the update wiped out big publishers like Render Media or LittleThings. While their websites are still up, the companies went under. The cause of this was the branded policy update which forbids affiliate links from being shared on Facebook Fanpages. Additionally, there were other additions to the policy update many people ignored, and are now reaping the unwanted fruit of non-compliance.

Why is Facebook currently banning so many Fanpages?

We won’t get into the specifics, but here is what it all boils down to:

1. Facebook doesn’t want you to share same links across multiple pages
2. Facebook doesn’t want you to share content not related to the fanpage or content that doesn’t belong to you

This makes is difficult for everyone who used pages solely for random traffic by sharing click-bait articles. We predict that in order to stay afloat, admins will need to stay on topic and keep a one-domain-one-Fanpage policy, or simply reduce the frequency of your campaigns. We still have publishers who have huge networks and they still do what everyone did, which is share links all over Facebook, and they still have every single page (so far). However, it’s a good time to re-think your Facebook strategies.