Facebook Seeks To Eliminate ‘Click-Baiting’ Posts In Their News Feed

On August 25th Facebook announced that it wants to improve the News Feed for its users by seeking to eliminate “spammy posts.” “Click-baiting” is the term used in an official release on facebook.com to describe what the higher ups at Facebook want to minimize. This “spammy post” reduction is one portion of a two-part update that Facebook hopes will improve its News Feed feature.

The official release indicates that, “Click-baiting” is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.”

The decision on the part of Facebook to make this improvement to their News Feed is based on their own research. According to a Facebook study, “80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through.” Their conclusion is that “click-bait” stories overwhelm content from Facebook friends that people are likely to be more interested in.

One method that Facebook uses to decide what is and is not “click-bait,” is simply measuring the time that a link keeps someone away from Facebook. Their hypothesis is that if something is more valuable it will keep the users attention longer, and if its spam, they will bounce right back to Facebook. Another way for Facebook to measure the quality of a post is to measure the amount of clicks verses the amount of comments, shares and likes it receives. They feel that if it’s a quality post, it will receive more interaction that just quick clicks, and fast returns to Facebook.

The second part of the update is geared towards making links friendlier to click on. In a study, Facebook found that users, “often prefer to click on links that are displayed in the link format (which appears when you paste a link while drafting a post), rather than links that are buried in photo captions.” The study also found that the posts in the simple link format received twice as many clicks as those that were buried in photo captions.

The question of whether or not this will affect the Facebook page for your store is likely no, unless you post a lot of “click-baiting” content. On that subject Facebook said that, “a small set of publishers who are frequently posting links with click-bait headlines that many people don’t spend time reading after they click through may see their distribution decrease in the next few months”