Facebook wants you to say bye to clickbait heads

Clickbaits are a lot of fun, but now, Facebook wants you to do away with them. If you don’t, your content may not make it to the News Feed.

You probably already know how Facebook decides which posts to show to its users. Likes, comments, and shares are some of the main factors that determine whether a piece of content would show up on the News Feed. There may be privacy issues involved here, but this algorithm allows a user to find stories they’d actually read—based on what other people have viewed so far.

Recently, however, Facebook said that it wants to take this mechanism one step further. Of course, people report being happier with their News Feed when the “Top Stories” are exactly those they’d like to engage with. So, to move toward this direction, the popular social platform started working on an algorithm that would show users not just the most important stories, but also the stories they’d truly be interested in.

No more clickbaits?

In order to create a high-interest News Feed, Facebook has been asking thousands of users to rate the quality of the content they see on their feed and whether the content they see matches their preferences. Results gleaned from these surveys will help Facebook understand how to successfully tailor the News Feed to individual users.

With such an algorithm in place, will we see the demise of clickbaits?

For online marketing practitioners and Facebook page administrators, clickbait heads can be extremely fun to use. It’s a quick way to get users to click on your posts and bring the attention to stories that you want to be read. It’s a great strategy to raise brand awareness and get noticed in a highly cluttered web. But while clickbaits serve this good purpose in the content marketing arena, many readers end up disappointed when they discover that the article’s contents don’t live up to the headline’s promise. Now, with Facebook’s coming update, this trend might die soon.

How will this affect your page?

As a result, some pages might see increases in traffic, while some may experience declines. All this would depend on your posting activity, your followers, and the quality of your content.

What’s unfolding here is the Internet’s massive move toward an online space that focuses on content value rather than on superficial web traffic that fails to drive up engagement. In other words, if your social media marketing strategy is designed to aim for clicks instead of genuine user interactions, you’re bound to fail. And now that Facebook, which has about 1.59 billion monthly users, has joined this movement, this pressures brands—in a good way—to rethink their content strategies.