Okay, so if you’re reading this, you’ve been brought to this blog under false pretence. There’s no gossip and no 74 part story that requires you to click through from page, to page, to page, being inundated with adverts that inevitably pop-up at your finger just as you’re about to tap to the next page. In reality, this blog is an experiment. I’m curious as to how many people I can get to visit this page and if it works, it unfortunately will prove just how broken social media advertising is.
A quick history for those who don’t know, in the past you would start a Facebook group, you would get likes, you would post a status and the majority of your followers would see what you were saying. Then Facebook went public, and as such, shareholders wanted to see a return on their investment. One of the ways in which Facebook thought they would make money, was to massively hamstring your page exposure without purchasing a post boost/promotion. However, this could be circumvented by creating engaging content, that the Facebook algorithm would recognise and promote. So in a lot of respects, all this did was encourage business pages to carefully think what content they would push out.
Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse and we now arrive at the era of the “click bait”. Essentially this is what the title of this blog entails, create a headline that encourages people to visit your site that has a piece of news (most of the time which isn’t particularly relevant to the title). These sites also tend to be full of advertising and click throughs (you need to visit multiple pages to complete the story). Now unfortunately, Facebook’s algorithm tends to promote these posts automatically, which is particularly galling when you’re trying to create engaging, interesting content.
So I would like to get your thoughts on the topic; whether you’re a fellow digital professional trying to promote your business, or a user that is fed up with the scourge of click bait on your social media timelines. Leave your comments below.
