You may think that using clickbait is a clever way to drive free traffic from Facebook but they have been clamping down on these types of posts for a number of years now. How do you define a clickbait post? Well these have a degree of sensationalism about them that really mislead the user.
A couple of examples will explain this more clearly:
“Movie star forced out of nightclub by security” – this post does not reveal the name of the celebrity and is therefore withholding information from the user.
“Use this one trick to lose 14 pounds in seven days” – this is just a misleading title A few years ago these kinds of clickbait titles would have got a lot of clicks on Facebook. As a result of this they would appear higher in user news feeds to get even more clicks. But Facebook started to notice that the quality of the content that users clicked through to was poor quality.
They did some user research and discovered that 80% of the time their users preferred to read headlines that actually helped them to decide whether they should click through to read a full article
or not. Facebook then started measuring the time that users spent on the external page before they would go back to Facebook.
The message is clear here. When you are creating your posts for Facebook and you want users to click through to your website don’t use headlines that they will consider clickbait. You can do this by avoiding language that is:
• Exaggerated
• Misleading
• Sensational
Tell Facebook users what they can expect when they click through to your website. This will help them to make the decision to click or not and will keep you in Facebook’s good books as well. When a user clicks through to your website make sure that the content is related and that it is engaging. Keep them on your site as long as possible.
Your website needs to have fast loading times and be optimized for mobile devices. You may think that this is obvious but there have been thousands of examples where this was not the case and there still are today.