Facebook has made several changes over the years to its Page structure. Presently, we live in a world with what Facebook calls the Classic Page Experience and the New Page Experience. Facebook is moving to migrate all pages to the New Page Experience.

In Rival IQ, we aim to provide the best audience metric we can given the best available data for each Page experience.

An example of the Classic Page Experience is Recess Coffee & Roastery. Note that in the About section, Facebook delineates between Likes and Follows. For pages of this type, Rival IQ ingests the page like count (and not the followers). We use the page likes count because it is the only number that Facebook makes available that consistently matches the Facebook site. Their API returns results for followers inconsistently, and when it does return, the number does *not* match what they display on the Facebook site. We do not believe Facebook will ever resolve this issue.

An example of the New Page Experience with "Follow" configured as the primary page button is Alex Honnold. In this case, note that the main header now contains a followers count, and the About section contains no additional information on page likes. For this type of page, the only audience data available for competitive benchmarking is the follower data, and that's what Rival IQ ingests and displays.

An example of the New Page Experience without "Follow" configured as the primary page button is NetBase Quid. In this case, we see that Facebook displays both likes and followers in the header of the page. In this case, Rival IQ ingests, and displays page likes as the primary audience metric for competitive benchmarking.

Facebook has recently changed this behavior, and we're working on making both metrics available to our customers within Rival IQ's Custom Dashboards.