Facebook "Prepared to Clamp Down on Clickbait"

If you’re one of many online businesses that has looked to take full advantage of what Facebook has to offer with regards to promoting your brand and building a positive reputation amongst potential customers, you’ve probably had to wade through ‘clickbait’ in the past.

 

Clickbait is the title given to fake headlines and news stories that plague Facebook News Feeds’ across the world and it’s capable of driving the average online business user insane. For those that work hard to improve their appearance in social media, this can be a particularly frustrating issue.

Thankfully we woke to positive news surrounding Clickbait this morning, as Facebook have decided that enough is enough.

The countless complaints we’ve been making to them regarding the constant build up of fake, suspicious-looking links to articles on our News Feeds’ has finally been heard and Facebook have today said they’ll be cracking down on them. So what exactly have they done about it?

The first thing Facebook are looking to do is monitor just how long people spend reading news articles that they link to. By doing this, Facebook can prioritise content that’s worth reading and exploit clickbait for what it is.

Of course, this is going along with the ideology that people click away as soon as they realise they’ve fallen for a spammy headline. Facebook’s plan B is to monitor how regularly an article is shared and liked, as this can also point us in the direction of content worth viewing.

Facebook explained in a post in their online newsroom that clickbait “tends to get a lot of clicks”, meaning that these posts “get shown to more people and get shown higher up in the News Feed”.

Facebook also said they found 80% of people preferred headlines on their News Feed that gave them an indication of what it is they’d be reading (surprise, surprise).