Clickbait posts have become a standard practice for many low-quality news outlets as well as some of the larger more respectable news & media websites in recent years. A typical clickbait post will be published onto Facebook with enough information to entice you to click on the article to find out the rest of the information. Publishers to do this to bring traffic to their websites which will increase their overall website visitors and pageviews (these two metrics look rather attractive to potential advertisers).
Facebook has seemingly had enough of these clickbait posts and has updated its algorithms to make these types of posts less visible. In a recent blog post on the Facebook Newsroom blog, the social media giant has outlined what it considers being clickbait and what you can do to avoid it.
One of the key metrics that Facebook will be analysing to judge whether a post is of the clickbait variety is whether or not a user immediately returns back to Facebook after clicking on a link. One of the examples that Facebook featured on their blog post is from a Facebook page called Celebrity Gossiping. Their title, ‘You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet…’.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable decline in the reach of organic Facebook posts due to paid social advertising and clickbait posts like this taking up prime real estate in users timelines. This move could help to improve the visibility of organic business social media posts. Posts from your friends and sponsored posts will continue to gain the most visibility as Facebook tries to make the timeline as useful and spam-free as possible.