Click-bait sucks.
You’ve undoubtedly been there, flipping through your timeline, when you come across a headline, and maybe a picture, dripping with intrigue, begging you to click through.
And so you do, only to be ultimately disappointed.
And here’s the kicker – despite being typically disappointing, click-bait works. Click-bait spreads through social networks and gets people onto sites with frightening regularlity. Hell, click-bait turned Buzzfeed into a household name. Made Upworthy the fastest growing website in history. And click-baity headlines have been leveraged by businesses large and small.
Or did it? Lately, Facebook has been cracking down on what it sees as “click-bait” content, going so far as to update how their algorithm ranks and sorts content to screen out this undesirable content.
For those of us creating content and trying to drive users to it, Facebook’s response raises an important question:
What constitutes click-bait, and how do I avoid getting penalized for it?
The Rise and Fall of click-bait
In hindsight, maybe Buzzfeed was never that bad. Sure, their name was quickly associated with click-bait – content that was created purely to be shared, to drive up page views and rake in those advertising dollars. But Buzzfeed, with their GIF listicles, ”37 Things Only People From X understand,” and “Which Type of Hanes Underwear Are You?” quizzes were mostly harmless.
To me, it was Upworthy who did the real damage. The ostensibly “good” website, focused on publishing click-bait that was supposed to make the reader feel good, but effected little-to-no actual social change – reading as a form of slacktivism [1], if you will.
But the harm that Upworthy did wasn’t in merely creating slacktivist click-bait as a business model. The real damage came from the change to headlines, which paired with the calculated heart-warming nature of the articles, were tested and tweaked and modified to spread like wildfire [2]. The result? Upworthy became the fastest growing website in history.
That kind of success draws imitators. Soon, Facebook feeds were littered with intriguing headlines begging for clicks. Marketers started pitching the tactic to small businesses. Online news sites, that were trying desperately to gain legitimacy, tweaked their content to chase clicks [3]. Even established mainstream press like Time [4] and The Guardian both got in on the act [5].
Seemingly overnight, everything on Facebook became unbelievable. The social network, whose sharing algorithm and large potential audience is at least partially to blame for click-bait, faced a crisis.
So, the largest social networking site in the world did what was necessary – they declared war on click-bait.
To Avoid Click-bait, You Must First Understand It
Before we get into how Facebook plans to banish click-bait, let’s dig into how click-bait differs from traditional content.
And let’s start with an industry joke.
Good content creators could easily teach you the secret behind Upworthy’s success, but you wouldn’t believe what happened next.
The humor, of course, is that Upworthy’s success isn’t really that unbelievable. In hindsight, it’s calculated and seemingly unavoidable. The website started with interesting, even good, content, and optimized their way to a formula that worked. Upworthy then iterated on that formula with ruthless efficiency – paying close attention to the headline.
Click-bait headlines are a different beast from those associated with print media. Print headlines, from around the Civil War on, formed the base of the inverted pyramid [6]. That is, you could read just the headline and get the jist of the story. Of course, in print media, the headline is seldom divorced from the content, requiring less action from the reader than a click. Print media headlines also suffered from much less competition. Most readers, myself included, subscribe to only one daily newspaper and a handful of monthlys. This information scarcity meant that headlines existed purely to inform the reader as to current events.
On the internet, the headline serves a much different job. The headline is the most shared part of any article. It’s the default sharing mechanism on Twitter – able to be paired with a link and fill a tweet. Pair that headline with an image on Facebook, and it fills up a feed quite nicely. On social media, titles are often divorced from articles, competing against one another, and need to inspire action (in the form of a click) from the reader.
The digital headline needs to both inform and inspire action, even if it’s only a minor one like opening an email or clicking away from a social media channel.
The click-bait’s primary tactic for inspiring action is to create intrigue. Hence the declaration that “you won’t believe what happens next.” Or that you’ll be “inspired.” Or “your life will be changed.”
But an intriguing headline alone doesn’t necessarily create click-bait is bad, it’s merely a tool to help identify it.
An article becomes click-bait when the promise made in the headline isn’t delivered on by the content. The content itself might be fine, might be serviceable, might even be good. But the dissonance between what was promised and what was received outweighs any inherent quality. In short, click-bait is undesirable to “respectable” publishers because it intentionally, even if benignly, misleads readers. And that’s bad for business.
How Facebook Measures Those Unmanaged Expectations
As an institution, Facebook likes to call itself “data-informed” rather than “data-driven,” emphasizing the internal checks they place on being purely analytical. These checks mean that when it comes to the war on click-bait, Facebook isn’t merely relying on headline filtering [7].
Instead, the social networking site is taking headlines and adding several other measures in an attempt to suss out whether content is Low Value, like click-bait, or High Value. The two biggest measures, as seen below, are Time on Site (how long the reader spends on the shared content) and post-visit interaction (whether the user likes, comments, or shares the content afterward).
We call this a Value Construct.
Of course, that’s a simplified flow for how Facebook Value Construct. And that flow is built on what the social networking giant has said their construct is.
There are likely a great deal of other factors that will play – such as qualities shared with other content, the historical factors of the linked site, and even potentially activity that Facebook observes on the site itself through things like Activity Trackers and Like Buttons [8] [9] [10].
Based on what they’ve shared, it seems like Facebook is placing a great deal of importance on getting users to actually engage in content as a means to weed out click-bait. But they’re also looking to kill click-bait at the source.
I speak, of course, of the Linked Photo Description. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an intriguing photo paired with a click-baity headline as a description paired with a link.
According to Facebook’s research, users are not a fan of this. So, Facebook has announced that they will start prioritizing updates that share links as links, over those that bury them in the caption.
Between placing a value construct on content, and taking away a common tactic of sharing click-bait, Facebook is hoping to reduce both the effect and attraction of Low Value content.
How to Thrive In a Post-Click-bait Facebook
Based on what Facebook has said, it’s fair to assume that the social networking giant intends the vacuum created by the death of click-bait to be filled with good content. But “good” can be an awfully subjective term. Worse, the ultimate arbiter of what is, or isn’t, good is the audience – and if we had a magic ball that let us know what would be a success with the audience, the world would be a different place.
Stepping away from the subjective idea of “good” content, let’s instead focus on the three elements that tend to make content more shared.
Relevance – Is the content on a subject, from a position, and at a time that is inherently useful to the audience?
Value – Does the audience find the content actually entertaining, informative, or providing enough opportunity to justified the time and attention to consume it?
Emotional Charge – Does your audience connect to your content on a strong emotional level?
Running click-bait through these three factors, we can see that they frequently nailed the emotional charge – at least the pieces that reach the audience. Upworthy built their readership on the ability to stoke intrigue, shock, awe, inspiration, and rage.
And those most people never saw it, Buzzfeed had an entire campaign of content targeted at micro-niches, really nailing the relevancy factor with articles like “40 Signs You Went to Berkeley” [11], “21 Signs You’re Dating a Designer” [12], and “32 Signs You Grew Up in Ealing” [13].
The modern business probably doesn’t have the need, nor the budget, to invest in Buzzfeed-esque micro-targeting. But there are still ways to improve each of those three factors to help your content succeed on Facebook and other social networking sites.
How to Make Your Content More Relevant
Relevancy is a tricky beast. It’s often easier to spot when something is irrelevant – like parachutes for fish – than it is to do the opposite. However, just like those fish, the foundation for relevant content is formed by a solid understanding of your audience – not just who they are, but what are their needs, their desires, their interests (both direct and tangential).
As you might suspect, the bigger the audience, the harder they are to know on such an intimate level. For most organizations, the path to more relevant content lies in narrowing the audience. The more you refine your focus, the deeper your level of understanding can go with the same amount of effort.
After you’ve narrowed your audience, the next step is to understand them. There are several ways to do this – but the three biggest are:
- Talk to you audience. Find out what they say they want.
- Talk to your front-lines, the people who deal with your audience. Learn from those who engage on a personal level, like Sales and Customer Support, what your audience responds to.
- Look at your competition. It’s not cheating to see what others are doing and what your audience responds to. This is a great way to find best practices and missteps you want to avoid.
How to Make Your Content More Valuable
We’ve written quite a bit about the creating more valuable content. Our primary model for this is the Transactional – where the audience benefit (entertainment, information, opportunity) balances with the attention and data that the business asks for.
When it comes to improving the value of a piece of content, we use two primary checks.
Measure for attention.
The most frequent method for paying for content is Attention – the combination of time and focus. Attention is a zero-sum game, meaning that the Attention your audience is paying to your content is Attention that other content is not getting.
Fortunately, Attention can be estimated fairly easily. For written content, the rule of thumb is 250 or so words per minute of attention. Audio and Video content is even easier as it has a fixed length.
Once you have your Attention Requirement, convert that into a dollar amount based on the average salary of your audience. A quick guide is that a $60,000 a year salary works out to be $0.50 a minute.
Would you pay $5 to consume the content you have created? Would your audience? If the answer is no, you’re probably not providing enough value.
Measure for your brand.
This is my go-to standard for creating branded content. When trying to assess a the value of a piece of content, extract the brand from it. Ask yourself, “If my business went away tomorrow, would people still read/listen/watch this?”
If the answer is no, then you’ve likely got low value content on your hands that’s artificially buoyed based solely on the strength of your brand.
Improving the cost of attention means either cutting price, or proving more entertainment, information, or a better opportunity. Improving against brand means focusing on the needs of your audience.
How to Improve Your Content’s Emotional Charge
The final section deals with the area where click-bait arguably outshined most traditionally good content. That is, click-bait does well at triggering a feeling. And feelings are the things that get people to share content.
A study of viral content and emotions by Fractl [14] took a look at which feelings were associated with sharing and found that the top five were:
- Surprise
- Curiosity
- Cheerfulness
- Admiration
- Annoyance
Creating content with an Emotional Charge must be deliberate. Content must be created explicitly to lead the audience to a specific emotional response. This means identifying the desired reaction before creating content.
You can do so with the inclusion of adding a simple question to your pre-creation brainstorming, “After reading/listening/watching, how do I want the audience to feel?”
After you’ve created the content, have a small group of testers review and react to the content on an emotional level. If they don’t find the emotion, modify the content until it reaches the emotion charge you’re looking for.
When it comes to sharing your content, don’t forget the headline. The folks at the Advanced Marketing Institute have put together a free Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) assessment tool [15] that you can plug your headline into.
Just ensure that the emotion suggested in the headline is actually paid off via the feeling created by the content.
Takeaway
Facebook declaring war on click-bait might have a sweet ironic tinge to it, but surviving it is old hat. In fact, the advice on how to survive Facebook’s algorithm change is the same as for surviving any of Google’s algorithm change – your content needs to help your audience succeed.
The post Is Your Content Any Good? How to Thrive on a Post Click-Bait Facebook appeared first on Recurve.
