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Insights:You’ll be SHOCKED at Facebook’s VICIOUS clickbait witch-hunt!

July 26, 2017

Clickbait headlines are almost as common on the Internet as cute kitten videos. They promise you JAW DROPPING! UNBELIEVABLE! MIRACULOUS! stories if you just click on the link….please, please, please click on the darn link!

The reality is the payoff to the headline is always disappointing and sometimes just the old bait and switch.

I have never agreed that tricking people to visit your site is a sound marketing strategy. In fact, it’s a pretty effective way of ensuring your visitors never become customers. Obviously some marketers have never heard the story of the boy who cried wolf.

Facebook also dislikes clickbait on their site. They believe, rightly so, that it can ruin the users’ experience.

Over the years, Facebook has tried to punish clickbaiters through various punitive measures and has even created a list of “unacceptable” headlines. But even for all these efforts, the battle is not over – and you WON’T BELIEVE what they’ve done now!!! (Sorry, even though I hate clickbait headlines, they are kind of fun to write.)

Facebook’s new clickbait eradication plan involves analyzing clickbait headlines at an individual post level. They will be searching for headlines that are either exaggerating information or withholding information – a much more time consuming approach, but certainly a more thorough way of dealing with the Internet’s tricksters.

The penalty for being found out as a clickbaiter is your post will appear lower on news feeds, meaning less people will see your post. Limiting reach is a pretty powerful deterrent to companies whose sole goal is to increase traffic.

The real risk to ethical marketers is being tagged as a clickbaiter through mistakes or misunderstanding. The best way to avoid getting punished is to ensure your headlines aren’t blatant exaggerations and the information in the linked article actually corresponds with your headline.

CLICK here NOW to see how a marketing company CRUSHED THE INTERNET!
(Actually, it’s a link to Insight Marketing Design’s digital projects.)

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