You won’t believe what Facebook said in its clickbait blog post.
We all see them, hate them…and occasionally still click on them. Clickbait posts in your news feed with titles like “You’ll never believe what…” or “What this celebrity said will shock you.”
Facebook, in its never-ending quest to mess with your news feed on a daily basis, is finally taking clickbait posts head-on. In a Facebook Blog post, the social media giant said it will change how such articles appear in your feed.
The changes are coming within Facebook’s existing toolbox, so the only way you’ll notice the changes (assuming there are no bumps in the road, and that’s a sizable assumption) is the lack of aforementioned titles. Facebook will now account for time spent on a link, and how a link is shared when organizing news feed content.
“[A] factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends,” said Facebook Researcher Khalid El-Arini, and Product Specialist Joyce Tang in the blog post. “If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.”
I’ll be happy as a clam to see less clickbait, but how will this affect other kinds of posts? With the like/share strategy laid out, whatever normal posts you make to Facebook should be fine, so long as you have friends who interact with the posts via comments, likes, or shares.
