Why do fans leave?

[punisa]

This is rather interesting. When we publish a news story that gets lots of visitors we usually see the number of our fans on facebook increasing.
But if we perhaps publish something political that isn't always liked by everyone, we see some 5-6 people leaving.

Okey, this is all logical and understood. You get fans if people stumble upon the content they like and you loose them if that same content is not what they like.

But here is my dilemma - today we hadn't published anything at all. Just took a day off to work on some other stuff. And almost 15 fans "unliked" from our facebook page. What is behind that?

Do users actually monitor how frequent they get news feeds? I sincerely doubt it. I believe the users shouldn't be bombarded by updates anyway.
So what actually happens here? Do users browse their "fan lists" occasionally and take time to dislike from sites they are not interested anymore?

I saw research that claims two main reasons why fans leave are:
1) too much content
or
2) content doesn't interest me anymore

But if you do not publish anything for 1 day... what is the case then?

Thanks for all of your opinions :)

[anallawalla]

Some people might check FB just once a week or less frequently. I don't check it daily. If they don't have a lot of friends or pages to follow, they might see an old news item and decide to leave.

Some people might not realise that liking a page makes them a permanent fan until they unlike the page. The answers will vary depending on the demographics.

[tangor]

"Like" has been a two-edged sword for FB... Their users, for the most part, "like" having a lot of "friends" and that includes sites, etc. But age is setting in for many users and they realize that what they "liked" once before they have no interest in now...

And as anallawalla said above, FB users who are infrequent (I'm in the visit once-a-week to 10-day category) just don't have the time, or patience, to deal with all those "friends"...

Just deleted six today. Put in perspective, I have about 200 friends, not 200,000 or 2,000,000. I can manage 200, the other levels would require hiring a staff to manage "friends" :)

[luisrivera]

I have a Fan Page about 1,800 i really dont know why but the last month i just not gain any suscriber, i really dont know what was happening but thats no happening before.

[wpride]

I never had problem with fans leaving my fan page.

[lexipixel]

It does happen. It's evolutionary. Let's say you joined Facebok when you were 14 years old, and became a fan of several "gothic novel" figures, a pop princess or two, and your favorite lunch snack.

A few years later, you tastes change and you cull the old and reinvent yourself.

Another effect is the "just too many" problem -- you can't be a fan of everything or your online persona appears vague.

And, since it's "social networking", some things just go out of favor with your social network and the peer pressure to un-fan a page occurs.

People's taste (especially younger people's) in politics, music, food, travel, fashion and other trendy topics are subject to the same fate.

[timchuma]

There's just too much stuff to look at these days.

When the new groups format arrived that kept sending me emails for every update to a group I found myself having to remove myself from groups to stop the clutter.

I do still have an older group and the newer page as I couldn't work out how to shut down the group.