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Robyn Hardman, Digital Consultant
Facebook’s Waging War on Clickbait (And You Won’t Believe How That’s Good for You!)
The days of the clickbait headline ruling the Facebook News Feed are seemingly over, as the social media giant recently announced a change to the algorithm that decides which posts get priority.
The change, which Facebook announced on its blog, will quash posts with headlines or link titles that “withhold information required to understand what the content of the article is, and headlines that exaggerate the article to create misleading expectations.”
Facebook’s blog went on to explain exactly what they meant by that: “For example, the headline ‘You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet …’ withholds information required to understand the article (What happened? Who tripped?) The headline ‘Apples Are Actually Bad For You?!’ misleads the reader (apples are only bad for you if you eat too many every day).”
Despite their irritating nature, these kinds of posts are still very effective on Facebook, and it is hoped that this new change to the algorithm will work alongside a previous change that penalised links with a high bounce rate. Ultimately, the change is part of Facebook’s goal to prioritise personal stories over business ones.
Although it might seem like doom and gloom, the change isn’t necessarily bad news for good marketeers. By de-emphasising poor clickbait material, it allows well-constructed content that’s relevant to the audience to shine and reach far more people. Meanwhile, all those rubbish posts get pushed down to the bottom of the pile.
So now that there’s less noise to distract fans and followers, businesses have got even more space to show off great, compelling content that will help get their message out there.
Found this useful? Check out a few of our other posts:
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- Big changes are coming to Facebook's News Feed
- How video’s reinventing Facebook reach
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