We all want our content to perform well, and as marketers, we sometimes worry too much about making our content clickable rather than valuable. By manipulating headlines or purposely leaving out details to encourage clickthroughs (“click-baiting”), however, you’re actually doing more harm than good — at least on Facebook.
While these posts tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that they get shown to more people and are displayed higher up in News Feed, stories with “click-bait” headlines can actually drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about. Adopting this habit means that every one of your posts will eventually need a click-bait headline if you hope to have it shown in News Feed.
Manipulating headlines isn’t a long-term solution for your content strategy. Facebook is making sure of this by weeding out stories that people report as spammy and reducing the number of click-bait stories in News Feed. Here’s what you need to know about these changes, and how you can help your link-based content moving forward.
Detecting Click-Bait Stories
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people don’t like being tricked. When asked what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80 percent of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through.
One of the ways in which Facebook plans to detect click-bait stories is by looking at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people spend time reading an article after clicking it, it suggests that they’ve found something valuable. However, if they click through and then come straight back to Facebook, that’s an indication that they didn’t find something that they wanted.
Another way the site’s cracking down on click-bait …read more
Source:: Sprout Social