Facebook is all set to crack down on the “clickbait” and has tweaked its algorithm to find posts that when clicked through turns out to be spam or irrelevant and weed it out from the News Feed.
Camouflaged click-baiting posts in the Facebook News Feed require users to only click on the link in order to increase traffic for the site.
Facebook has likely adopted a 2-pronged strategy to tackle the issue. Firstly, it will note the amount of time users spend on the destination sites before coming back to their Facebook page. The idea behind this approach is that if users bounce back immediately from the destination page, it probably doesn’t have interesting information or it is spam.
Another criteria coupled with this approach is comparing the number of likes and shares the posts receive to the number of click-throughs. After clicking on a link in the post, if users come back and like the post or share it with their friends, Facebook algorithm will consider that it is a legitimate post that interests its readers while the other posts which are not liked will be considered click-baits and removed from news feeds.
Secondly, Facebook will assign more value to posts that include a title with a link to the destination page on top of a picture, as users will be able to have an idea of what they are going to read about by clicking the link. Posts with a short description that summarizes the content of the page users are taken to, will also be considered for inclusion in news feeds more often than other posts that appear without links or pictures.
