This social network will soon punish you for engagement baits

fuad lawal

December 20, 2017 6:25 AM

“How many likes will this post get?” is Facebook's new war against lack of creativity.

According to Facebook, this move is because people have complained that they “dislike spammy posts on Facebook that goad them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions.”

“LIKE this if you think…” and other Facebook casualties.

Facebook is categorising engagement bait into three; there’s the vote bait, the react baits, and the share baits.

Now, Facebook has identified and categorised hundreds of thousands of posts, and they’ll be carrying this measure using a machine learning model that can detect the categorised parts.

When will this roll out happen?

In the coming weeks. Facebook is planning to roll out this feature gradually, and at the same time give publishers time to adjust and get their acts together. The consequence of this, when the roll out takes full effect, is that posts still found wanting will experience a significant drop in reach, and thus, engagement.

Moral of the story here: Authenticity is king, and now even Facebook is making sure to enforce that.

What does this mean?

This is one move in the direction of Facebook's 'sanitisation' efforts of its social network. This year, Facebook has made efforts to curtail many of the problems plaguing the social network, like fake news. One of the ways it is doing this, is by taking strong measures, sometimes against publishers on its platform.

It'd be interesting to see how this new measure pans out in the long run, and how publishers evolve and create new ways to beat Facebook's algorithm. Because while Facebook wants content driven by creativity, Publishers on the other hand just want to grow, by any means necessary.

Now, share this post with post with 30 of your friends and expect good luck in 30 days. Don’t ignore this.

fuad lawal