“Like this if you love puppies!”, “Thumbs up if you hate slow drivers!”, “Share this with 30 friends to win a car!”. We have all seen these posts clogging up our newsfeeds, but Facebook has decided to make a change to the newsfeed so that we can all finally get away from the spam.
The company will soon be making a change that demotes “engagement bait” or posts that try to take advantage of Facebook’s system by asking users for likes and comments.
This comes after Facebook created new policies earlier in the year to reduce the amount of clickbait headlines and posts that have links to low-quality webpages. Websites that are outdated, spammy, lacking in information or poorly put together were affected and it seems like this new change will fit in nicely with these policies.
The reason for all the changes? To help prevent inauthentic content taking over the newsfeeds of its users, particularly after the company has been getting accused of spreading fake news throughout the platform.
So what can you do to avoid publishing engagement bait?
Create content your audience will find useful and meaningful
Sure, the clickbait posts may seem to get a lot of interaction, but if the interactions are meaningless and don’t provide your fanbase with anything useful or meaningful, it is likely that nothing will come of it in terms of sales and leads. If you create content that can be easily consumed with the right reasons and with an end goal to retain customers and create new ones, then your sales will boosted.
Build credibility, relevance and trust with your audience
When you create useful content and are genuine with your audience, you will build relationships, credibility and trust within your audience and this is a vital part of social media for businesses.
When people trust a brand, they are more likely to share and recommend to their friends and community, meaning you won’t need spammy posts to grab people’s attention.
Watch how you word your posts
The wording of your posts is incredibly important, especially now that there are new anti-spam policies in place.
If you are running a legitimate competition, try to steer clear of words that could be associated with click bait and don’t make it a requirement of your competition to like a post, share a post or click like on a page.
Facebook has said that this will be how they are tracking spam posts and demoting to the bottom of a news feed. And the more negative interactions your social media page has, the less likely it will be seen organically.
Check out the newsfeed publisher guidelines
These are now your bible. There is zero point in creating posts that are not going to be engaged with by your following or that are going to annoy new customers. You can find all the updated guidelines HERE.