A lot of content is shared on Facebook daily and many posts include engagement bites. I am sure you have friends on your list that share different images or links that would “help” them win trips or expensive products; or others that tag you in different posts for no reason. Facebook received different complains regarding those engagement bites and now finally takes action. Those engagement actions have diminished the quality of the content that is being shared and annoyed users all over the world. Starting this week, the process of demoting both individual posts and posts from pages has begun.
Several teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized a massive number of posts that belong to this engagement bait category to create a machine learning algorithm that can detect them and show less of those types of posts throughout the news feed.
More than this, within the next weeks, Facebook will begin to implement stricter demotions for Pages that use these kinds of posts in order to gain engagement – whether we are talking about likes, shares or comments. This process might take some time, though, in order to give advertisers time to adapt their content to the new regulations.
However, there is still a type of content that might create engagement, but will not be regulated by the new algorithm: asking for recommendations, help or advice, missing person announcements, ask money for a cause, advice on trips.
After making a step forward in what clickbait headlines and low-quality websites was done, this was the obvious step that had to be made in order to get rid of the spammy, misleading or sensational content in the news feed. This is a kind of a war against this type of content, promoting, on the other hand, quality and increasing authentic conversations throughout Facebook.
What will this fighting against engagement bait mean for advertisers?
This is a switch in a paradigm that should have happened long before, in order to oblige advertisers to create quality content and not take the easy way when it comes to promoting services, products or objects.
Advertisers that will still use this type of engagement bait will see a drop in the reach of their posts. So the following types of engagement will be punished: asking people to react to your post; asking people to comment with specific answers; asking people to share a post with their friends (or even public); asking people to tag friends in posts; asking people to vote based on reactions (like, love, sad etc).
What about you? Are you pleased with the new fighting against engagement bites algorithm? If you are an advertiser, have you ever used this type of engagement bait?
See also: Important Steps for Using Neuromarketing to Increase Facebook Engagement
