Facebook has been trying to stop all the clickbait articles that flood people’s newsfeed for quite some time, with varying levels of success. According to an announcement from the social network, they are implementing some changes to help further improve the quality of what people see. This is going to have a significant effect on marketers who use these types of posts to drive traffic.
First, their algorithm will be scanning the titles of posts that get shared more closely to look for common clickbait style phrases. For example, we’re likely going to see fewer titles with things like, “10 Women Justin Bieber has Dated (You won’t believe #4)” or other commonly used titles. They claim that they have flagged tens of thousands of these types of headlines as clickbate, and then taken that information and put it into their system so that it can accurately determine which articles are valid, and which are not.
Many users have complained to Facebook through surveys and other methods about the amount of these types of articles they are seeing. People seem to be catching on to the fact that catchy titles often lead to uninteresting articles, but they are still a popular way to drive traffic. Hopefully this update from Facebook will be the beginning of the end of this type of thing.
