Facebook has announced that it will begin to implement a new policy that minimizes "clickbait" social media strategies on News Feeds in order to provide an improved user experience.
"'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 said in an official 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."
Facebook's old policy gave priority to links that received the most clicks without any consideration for the content of the link or the usefulness of the content to users. Efforts to minimize clickbaiting will ideally give a better experience by analyzing data that explains how much time users spent reading a link.
Longer read times suggest that users found worthwhile information that similar users and friends of the user would enjoy as well. Other factors will include the amount of comments and shares that a link accumulates.
"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," Facebook added.
The changes initiated by Facebook are going to affect all digital media companies, some vastly more than others. Facebook drives the most traffic of all social media networks by a large margin. In June 2014, Facebook drove 23.39% of all social media traffic. The two closest competitors for social media traffic are Pinterest and Twitter at 5.72% and 1.03% respectively. Digital media companies that rely on clickbait tactics for ad revenue will need to develop new social media tactics to remain as profitable.
Facebook users should benefit from this new policy, but it will be hard to say until the changes take effect. Unforeseen repercussions could take place that are even more worse than the current annoyances. At least Facebook should be given credit for attempting to address the concerns of users even if it means that more engaging content would result in less time on the social network itself.
