Facebook made a few changes to their news feed algorithm that you should know about if you have a Facebook page. The first change should hopefully end the “You’ll never believe what happens next” posts from taking over your feed. The second is going to unify how links are posted.
"'Click-baiting' is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed." -Facebook
photo: Facebook
Facebook is going to fight click-baiting by tracking how much time people spend on your link after they click.
If people quickly leave your site, that is a sign that your content isn’t interesting or useful and you may be penalized. Facebook will also be following the ratio of social interaction to website clicks. If you don’t generate interaction, then your page might be penalized. The key is to create content that people are interested in and want to talk about. Just as Bill Gates prophesized in 1996, "Content is King."
Links will be prioritized in the News Feed.
Facebook wants the new link preview format to be used, instead of links being shared in the description of a photo. Sharing a photo with link in the description has been a great tactic for getting more Facebook interaction and reach compared to sharing the link on its own, but Facebook’s research shows that users prefer seeing the new link preview. It has a text snippet preview of the link they are clicking on as well as the preview image.
Below is an example from our page. Even with the increased interaction on the left photo post, the link post brought twice as many people to our site. This is a good change for anyone trying to build site traffic.
Today's changes should have positive effects on all Facebook users' news feeds. If you do have a Facebook Page, the basics have not changed. Create interesting content instead of tricking people into clicking to your site.
Interesting, thanks!
Good! those baiting links were crawling up my news feed like a chimpanzees about to grab bananas!
But atleast one good...minor.... thing came good from Facebook's Algorithms
Good to know what I've been doing for the past 9 months is going to show even better results now.
Now if only FB could clarify how the "people reached" algorithms work, it would be great. I have on posts 450+ people reached yet only end up with 5 likes, yet other times I have lower reached and more likes. I've given up trying to figure it out....It's a love/hate relationship.
While on the subject of bait clicking, good job with the new site Fstoppers.
Much less cheap articles and reposting from other sources. Looks better!
Thank goodness. I HATE click baiting. So much.
I'm intrigued by your results with posting links. I find the exact opposite on the university page that I post on. We get way less impressions when I post a link as opposed to a photo with a link in the description. Maybe that's changing?
You should see improved results as the links are pushed in the News Feed! The traffic increase we've seen is probably from people clicking on the preview image, thinking it will make it larger on their screen. Instead, it takes them directly to the link.