Tag Archive for: News Feed algorithm

You Won’t Believe What Facebook is Trying to Ban! (It’s Clickbait)

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FacebookClick

We can all pretty much agree clickbait is the worst. There’s nothing as annoying as clicking a misleading headline only to be taken to a poorly made website, usually covered in ads, and filled with bad copy. Thankfully, Facebook is trying to put an end to clickbait with new changes to their ranking algorithm.

After reviewing tens of thousands of articles and headlines, a team at Facebook built a system they believe will block huge amounts of clickbait by targeting common phrases. According to Facebook, the system works similarly to an email spam filter but for the News Feed.

The social network specifically defines clickbait as headlines that withhold information or exaggerate to create misleading expectations. That means headlines like “You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet or “Apples are Actually Bad For You?!” won’t be able to cheaply rack up clicks.

As Facebook explains:

We’ve heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines or link titles. These are headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people, forcing people to click to find out the answer. For example: “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”; “He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”; or “The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless.”

For most Facebook brands and publishers, this is good news. You won’t have to compete with sites that use cheap methods to rack up clicks and shares without creating compelling content. However, if you’ve been using clickbaity headlines, you may be in for trouble.

In the coming weeks, brands that are guilty of using clickbait will see their news feed visibility decrease substantially. If you want to avoid this, Facebook says to put more effort into your headlines and share content people want to read.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has taken efforts against clickbait. Back in 2014, the company released a similar update designed to cut out clickbait by measuring how long people stayed on a site before returning to Facebook. It also compared click-through rate and engagement rate to determine if content was actually high-quality.

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Facebook Targets Click-Bait In Your News Feed

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People have been gradually turning against “click-bait” for a while now and using the questionable tactic to attract attention may finally be accompanied by some real consequences according to an announcement from Facebook today.

According to the announcement, the social platform is rolling out an update to the News Feed algorithm that will help reduce the number of misleading or purposely vague headlines by incorporating the amount of time users spend reading a page as a signal.

Clickbait

“‘Click-baiting’ is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see,” Facebook research scientist Khalid El-Arini and product specialist Joyce Tang wrote in a blog post. ”

“Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.”

Click-bait certainly is effective, but this strategy has become so prominent that even casual internet users are becoming familiar with the phrase. More importantly, the majority appear to agree they don’t like it. 80% of Facebook users say they prefer headlines that give them a fuller picture about what’s behind the link instead.

Here’s Facebook’s explanation of how they are aiming to take down click-bait:

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.

Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends. If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.

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Facebook Updates News Feed Algorithm to Fight Spam

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Source: Wikimedia Commons

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In their ongoing quest to improve the quality of content filling users’ News Feeds, Facebook is implementing some extensive changes to their algorithm to cut out spam and pandering posts that are widely disliked by users.

Facebook was very open about their attempts to target spammy or manipulative users, but this is the largest attack on this type of posting so far. Previously, Facebook has combated pandering and spammy posts by limiting the organic reach of sites found to be too heavy-handed with calls to action.

According to Facebook, they are targeting publishers of Pages “that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would.” As such, they are punishing pages that:

  • Like-bait: Begging for users to like, comment, or share a post may seem like an innocent way to encourage activity on your page, but Facebook views it as a shameless attempt to expand post distribution. Facebook users are equally against like-baiting, as studies have shown that posts with similar calls to action receive less engagement and are viewed as being less relevant.
  • Frequently circulate content: Facebook says they have received frequent complaints about Pages that regularly re-run photos and videos that have already been popular on the network.
  • Post spammy links: The most transparently spammy practice on Facebook is to use inaccurate language or formatting to encourage clicks through to ad farms, low-quality content aggregators, or irrelevant content. Facebook is improving at identifying these types of posts, and they believe punishing misleading publishers will improve trust in the content spread over their site.
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