Tired of seeing posts on Facebook telling you to "click to see more"? Well so is Facebook as the social network is attempting to minimize how often spammy click-bait headlines show up in everyone's News Feeds.
The social network announced it's updating the News Feed to minimize click-baiting, or headlines that suggest users "CLICK to find out" and tease "You'll NEVER believe what happened next."
From now on pages that get a lot of clicks won't simply rise to the top. Rather posts that users spend an appreciable amount of time spend reading away from Facebook will be given greater presence.
In turn the social network hopes these richer stories will encourage more engagement and conversations.
Spam-a-lot
On the flip-side if users click though to a story and flip right back to their News Feed, Facebook will deem these posts as click-bait and reduce their visibility on the website.
Facebook noted it's making this change in an effort to please its user base. Supposedly the results of a Facebook survey discovered 80% of users wanted headlines that would help inform them about the story before actually clicking through to it.
Links please
Facebook also announced a second News Feed update focused on making sure posts with an included link in the text are promoted over links buried in photo captions.
Facebook claims that embedded links are simply easier for mobile devices users to tap on.
Both these changes will be ultra important to social media managers, forcing them to change up their sharing strategies. As for the rest of us, we can all rejoice that now we'll see far fewer posts that read "You'll NEVER guess what happened next" and more that actually inform us about what's going on in the world.
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