Facebook starts war on clickbait

Seems like they're keen to get headlines that tell more of the story, so people stay on FB longer. I'd be hugely surprised if they applied this rule to paid content.

I'm not entirely sure. They seem to be aligning super hard with their new values Building a Better News Feed for You | Facebook Newsroom.

I wouldn't be surprised if it goes down the line 20% text did recently. You can do it but they'll handicap your ad and it'll cost a hell of a lot more.

Note: This is an awesome overview of the changes to the newsfeed over the years.
Facebook Newsfeed Algorithm Change History

One thing that stood out to me the most was:

"To address clickbait headlines, we previously made an update to News Feed that reduces the distribution of posts that lead people to click and then quickly come back to News Feed."

Does this mean that they've added bounce rates to consideration since their last update? or was it there all along?

I suspect that the algorithm changes will harm the visibility of procrastination content and large entities like Buzzfeed, TechCrunch, I F**king Love Science will be affected as they continue to segment content into multiple feeds (new feed,science and tech, funny etc..). But as that continues, it will funnel more SMBs and online marketers away from organic SMM and into paid advertising.

Other notable points:

- identity: a system that determines what phrases are commonly used
- identity: Links posted from or shared from Pages or domains that consistently post clickbait headlines will appear lower in News Feed

- penalty: if the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is
- penalty: if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader
- penalty: bounce rate (quote from article - "we previously made an update to News Feed that reduces the distribution of posts that lead people to click and then quickly come back")

- reward: if a Page stops posting clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change

Regarding the reward above, they never mention in the FYI that the Page's content will return to their original expected position on feed, which could just as well mean that it's a disease with no cure. (thoughts?)

It's definitely worth focusing on Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing for the next few months, this isn't new but it's certainly become a more significant matter.

Would love to see them cleanup the fake GIFs also. The ones that have the GIF symbol on them and they are actually just a link.

Re's
Rob Whisonant

Moss

If you get the chance I would watch the latest ABC program of Media Watch on Iview there is a good 5 mins on the rise of Social media and the about of ad spend now going to Face Book & Google

Jason

Hard to tell but I'd say anything that contributes to a poor user experience.

Facebook is only doing what Google did years ago: kick low level marketers from its platform.

This is just veiled political censorship.

Moss. As an administrator you should know that this thread belongs in the Social Media sub forum

al

there goes the money shop

I think it will affect a ton of people who have FB pages with all of the posts that have some outrageous Photoshopped picture of a celebrity like a withered up Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) sitting in a wheelchair and then a title that says something like "We just lost one of our most treasured celebs."

People will click on it like CRAZY thinking that The Rock has died and usually once you click you will land on some factory style WordPress blog with a name like "ViralBox" and a slideshow article with a title like "10 Celebrities That Passed Away Since 2008." The article won't even have anything to do with The Rock, it will just have 10 pictures of celebs that have died since 2008 and a few lines of content underneath about how they died and the rest of the page is just LOADED with more native ads from companies like RevContent, Taboola, Outbrain, etc. Some even have Adsense on them too.

It's basically the "native ad arbitrage" model, and let me tell you, some marketers are raking in THOUSANDS of dollars a day doing this. I have been seeing it a lot more on Twitter lately. They cannot advertise those on Twitter because Twitter shut down that type of advertising right away, but people have numerous Twitter accounts built around this type of business model, and they can get loads of free traffic from them. So far I have not seen Twitter taking action against any of them.

I highly doubt that it's a business model that Facebook, Google, or anyone else will be able to kill, but by Facebook monitoring the news feeds, fan page, and group posts more closely this is definitely going to hurt their pocketbooks BIG TIME. They will have to start buying more paid advertising to get traffic to their arbitrage blogs which will definitely hurt their bottom line.

Overall, though, I'm kind of glad Facebook is going to clean this up because I've clicked on these things myself many times only to be disappointed to find that the article did not live up to the Facebook post at all. Of course, most of the time I've gone and done just what the poster wanted me to do, which was click another native ad that caught my attention once I landed on their blog, so I guess it works pretty well!

Facebook's been at this for quite some time now.... with mixed results.

It's anti-hoax system hasn't had much of an impact.

The reason? FB's content reporting system sucks. Maybe they should start there.

I think this is the right thing to do for Facebook. Anything that affects the user experience will eventually have a bad effect to all of us overall. This is the result of marketers with poor tactics who are trying to manipulate the system.

what about bitly ?

This is an epic headline in their example, it gave me a good laugh:

"When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”

Too funny :-)

some mixed result from my facebook accounts too ..hope the will not go agressive on this

As a marketer, that SUCKS!

As a Facebook user, that's AWESOME!

Looks like they are taking the stance and trying to improve on the 'user experience'
sucks to be us lol