How often do you get asked to ‘Like’, ‘Share’ or ‘Comment’ on what seems to be a ridiculous topic within your newsfeed?
A lot, right?
Well, for those of you who hate that kind of spammy nonsense, have no fear for Facebook is blasting these bad boys out of the water….FOR GOOD…ish!
While these types of strategies have proven fruitful when it comes to ensuring a post goes viral, they usually don’t provide any real value to the reader and are often flagged as something people don’t want to see on their newsfeed.
As the goal of the newsfeed is to provide relevant and engaging content to the right people at the right time, I think that Facebook is making the right move. I’m sick to death of being given ‘ultimatums’ such as ‘This person will stay homeless if you don’t ‘like’ or ‘share’ this post or ‘Which footballer is better?’ ‘Like’ for Ronaldo or ‘Comment’ for Messi.
Like-baiting
Fishing for attention! When a post in the newsfeed asks you to ‘Like’, ‘Share’ or ‘Comment’ in order to generate a bigger buzz and reach a far larger audience, this is called ‘Like-baiting’. These kinds of posts are generally rated to be 15% less relevant than other posts featuring similar stories.
In order not to detract users from stories of friends, family and sources they’re genuinely interested in, Facebook will be policing this kind of content to lessen the frequency of it being shown prominently in newsfeeds.
I’ll admit to being ‘guilty’ of this one, even if it has been for the right reasons. I’m genuinely targeted people who will be interested in my posts and encouraging them to share. Facebook says these changes will NOT impact people or pages who are actively trying to initiate, quality, relevant discussions.
Frequently Circulated Content
Resharing great content is a must for friends and family who have missed something the first time around. However, certain people and pages are abusing this idea by rehashing and resharing the same old tired posts multiple times, which is causing others to complain. Tests have shown that 10% fewer stories are hidden by users when Facebook makes an effort to show less of the repeated posts.
Spammy Links
If you’re tricking and deceiving people to click on your post, leading them to a url of something completely irrelevant, then beware…Facebook is onto you!
Several users have reported clicking links and getting sent through to a page of circulated ads and other junk, which doesn’t parallel with content which originally led them to click in the first place.
Facebook wants to ensure people find everything in their newsfeed trustworthy and have seen an increase in happy users since they’ve detected and reduced the cases of spammy links. *Original source material*