Who just loves a headline that urges to be clicked? After experiencing it, the answer is nobody. Why? Because they're only appealing before they're clicked, afterwards, it's just plain regrets.
There are lot of clickbait posts on the internet. And as for Facebook that is the most popular social media network, they're more than plenty. If users hate them, Facebook is hating them too. Now the company is officially at war with clickbaits.
Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithms more than many times as attempts to make users' feed more relevant. But clickbait posts seem to have found ways to get through, although Facebook has previously managed to track them down. As of August 4th, 2016, the company again updates its algorithm to put an end to these.
With the update, Facebook is filtering out clickbait pretty much like how Google hides spam inside its Gmail. To do so, it detects specific words, structures in sentences, and writing styles which "intentionally leave out crucial information, forcing people to click to find the answer."
To initiate the strategy, Facebook has humans to review thousands of headlines. The team end up with a list of categorized clickbait that comes under two key points:
- Headlines that withhold information required to understand the context of an article.
- Posts that exaggerate an article and create misleading expectations.
The algorithm update adds to Facebook's previous strategy that tries to pinpoint clickbait posts by looking how quickly users returned to their News Feed after visiting a link.
The New Order In The News Feed
How should the algorithm alters Facebook's News Feed? As always, Facebook wants to put the most relevant posts for users higher up while putting the less interesting ones lower down. With the update, articles that are transparent and have more informative headlines will now show up higher on the News Feed. Potential clickbaits will be listed far lower.
To make the attempt more convenient, Facebook won't just filter out individual clickbait posts, but to rank complete Pages and domains based on their overall tendencies towards obscured headlines. What this means is that Pages or websites that tend to share clickbait posts will be severely impacted.
However, algorithms do make mistakes. From time to time, spams can still get through the filters. And so will clickbaits. Pages and websites that occasionally send out clickbait articles could still get away with it.
But keep in mind that Facebook updates its algorithms frequently, so users can expect that Facebook will dig into this matter sooner or later.
A Brand At Stake
Facebook is the largest social media network on the web, and it has reasons to hate something when its users also hate that specific thing. Clickbaits are something so common that they're almost everywhere: from websites to social media networks, to blogs, forums, Q&A sites and others.
Users may not like clickbaits because obvious reasons: they just want you to click and nothing more. They urge you by creating the sense of curiosity, and when you fell for it you lost. Clickbait comes with a link that target an article on a website. While the article may appear normal, it's usually bloated with ads and call-to-action buttons. In short, the article usually isn't informational let alone helpful.
Its created to be clicked, nothing more. But for publishers and those that send those clickbaits, they kept doing that because the strategy do work. No matter how people hate clickbaits, they still click them.
Facebook hates clickbaits because users hate them as well. Furthermore, users that are curious with those links, will go away for a while to read low-quality posts while what they should do, is spending time on higher-quality articles. This certainly will affect Facebook as a brand. If one sees Facebook as a place full of spam and clickbaits, the first that will suffer should be Facebook.
But again, Facebook still needs to make money. If the update makes quality headlines and great articles have less overall engagement, Facebook won't like it. Facebook wants users to spend more time on Facebook, see its ads and click them. Here Facebook needs some fine tuning to keep all parties involved happy.