Facebook to marketers: the age of clickbait is over

August 5, 2016: Clickbait. We all know what it is – headlines like “you won’t believe what happens after this hamster bites this dog.” You probably see so many clickbait headlines each day – in native advertising slots, on social media feeds, and in blog sidebar areas – that you’ve developed your own version of “banner blindness” to screen them out.

Clickbait articles are just that – bait placed in order to yield clicks – whose entire purpose is to lead the user to an external site where they can be loaded up with retargeting cookies (or worse) to allow more annoying marketing in the future. Clickbait-style posts are  noisy, pushy, and have little value beyond what they bring to the marketer. In other words, they’re a form of spam.

Today, Facebook announced that it was taking steps to crush clickbait on its network. In a blog post, it announced that a new system – similar to an e-mail spam filter – will parse through headlines to eliminate those that are characteristic of clickbait-style headlines.

Our system identifies posts that are clickbait and which web domains and Pages these posts come from. Links posted from or shared from Pages or domains that consistently post clickbait headlines will appear lower in News Feed. News Feed will continue to learn over time — if a Page stops posting clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to stay clear of Facebook’s new clickbait filter: just adhere to the service’s publishing best practices guide. As the guide recommends, when you post, make sure that your headlines set appropriate expectations. Don’t withhold information, and never promise to deliver something on your destination page that’s not there. As Facebook advises, “Instead of relying on misleading headlines to intrigue the reader, share articles with accurate headlines that don’t exaggerate the topic and add your own voice to help drive genuine conversation around the content.”

Facebook – like Google and the FTC — has been on a warpath against deceptive online practices. “Organic content” is synonymous with “authentic, truthful content.” Marketing messaging  and questionable puffery is fine, as long as it remains within Facebook’s “paid” channels and is disclosed as such.

Clickbait might result in a temporary rush of traffic, but it also results in dissatisfied users who feel cheated, deceived, and abused. And enough of these users feel this way, they’ll flee for a service where messages are less deceptive. That’s obviously why Facebook is concerned about the practice, and why it’s decided to draw a line in the sand against it.

Some marketers might find it difficult to adjust. But while creating articles that actually deliver is a lot harder than creating catchy headlines that don’t, it’s the only way to build what you should be trying to build: user trust.