Facebook’s Focus On Reducing Clickbait Headlines Is A Good Thing

While I don’t know if that headline is clickbait based on Facebook’s new crackdown on such things, I don’t even care. I’m glad Facebook is going after the sketchy headline industry.

Let me explain, using my experience as a writer in the online marketing world.

For several years I worked as a writer at an agency that morphed into a startup. While working at the agency, I was directed to the well-known Copyblogger post on how to write headlines (which has since been transformed into what seems to be an online money-maker). While I don’t recall all of the information from that Copyblogger post, I do remember that the posts I wrote early on had what were probably considered boring headlines and perhaps wasn’t what Copyblogger had in mind. For example:

“How Positive Thinking Can Get You Into Trouble” or “You’re Not An Expert, And Everybody Knows It” or “What Makes For A Great Meetup?” or “Who You Follow On Social Media Is Changing You.”

I don’t think that these headlines meet Facebook’s standard for clickbait, which seems to be any headline that seems to leave out a crucial element of information that forces the reader to click to find a singular answer, or a headline that states something shocking with content that actually doesn’t support that. Facebook describes clickbait as follows:

For example, the headline “You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet…” withholds information required to understand the article (What happened? Who Tripped?) The headline “Apples Are Actually Bad For You?!” misleads the reader (apples are only bad for you if you eat too many every day).

As the company I worked for changed and veered into the marketing and startup world, my headlines were struggling. My boss began implementing some new procedures for headlines. I was to write 25 headlines in order to find that perfect one that would hook readers. I had to use “emotional” words. Headlines had to be analyzed and A/B tested, changing them over a period of time, to find the one that got the most engagement. I had to use different WordPress plugins (and we tried several) that evaluated my headlines against standards for keywords, clickability, and all sorts of things that had very little to do with what I had come to understand was a good headline from my days as a newspaper reporter. Sometimes, the resulting headline was confusing to me, the writer who had written the post, making me wonder what a reader experienced if they came in on such a headline.

After a while, I came to dread not the research and writing of blog posts, but the inevitable headline saga in which I had to find a way to twist words into what was often a barely readable conglomeration.

Soon, the concept of headlines became the focus of actual blog posts, and I was writing about why headlines were the most important thing, or how many words you should have in a headline.

See, the thing was all about the hook.

Not information. Not clarity. But a hook. Tell just enough to get a person to click or to share. The main thing was to bring them in. Make it sexy, make it a curious thing. Hack, killer, insane, weird trick — it sounded like a crime scene, some of the words that proliferated on marketing blogs during this time.

Towards the end of my work at that startup, I remember feeling somewhat despondent about what I had to write, and the headline frenzy was a huge part of it.

After I left, I continued to do freelance writing for the company for a year, during which time they developed a headline analyzer that worked with their app that purported to rate your headline based on emotions, word choices, and who knows what else. I also noticed that the blog posts I submitted were being given some rather strange headlines that didn’t match what I’d included when I sent in the post.

For example, I wrote about cold emails, and submitted the post as “Doing Cold Emails The Right Way” and saw it published as an oddly sexualized “How To Write Cold Emails That Are Unique (And Not Frigid)”.

Was it the word unique? Frigid? Some kind of cacophony? The suggestion of repression? I have no idea why that headline rated higher, but it did.

By that point, after a few haggles over edits and changes I didn’t care for (bloated introductions that awkwardly introduced downloads using words and phrases that didn’t match the voice of the rest of the post, edits that inserted copy with spelling errors into the body, graphic and call-to-action interruptions in the body of the post, and so on), I’d given up. I simply showed a friend the “frigid” headline and laughed it off.

“This is what passes for a headline on the internet, I guess,” I said.

At some point after its original publication, someone wisely changed that headline to “How To Write Cold Emails The Right Way” which is, I think, better than both my original and the extremely clunky secondary version even with the homophone.

This is only one example, though, and frequently I’d see a headline that didn’t make grammatical sense because, when you’re enslaved to a headline analyzer, you have to work with keywords that don’t always have verbs in the right tense. You’ve seen those headlines, too. Weird. Convoluted. Nothing a real person would ever say.

I wondered if, after many years of this practice, if online headlines would start to read as if monkeys randomly picked words.

I fed into these past few years of clickbait and clunky headlines you saw spread across the web because it was my paycheck. But I’m not proud of myself. I had a little note on my desk in the office, and later at my home office, which said “you’re writing for humans no matter how they push numbers.” You had to have numerical proof to justify everything you did, forgoing the word choices that created the lilt and cadence a writer normally uses to create voice.

It motivated me to try to write copy (and headlines) that pushed back against the current standards of what “worked” in online marketing. Every time I clicked “analyze” on those headline plugins and had to keep going back and changing words just to get a green light, I thought it was rather repulsive to churn copy through a numbers game.

Which, I suppose, is what the new Facebook algorithm does. That is what tech startups do, after all. They turn human capital into data points to better analyze and arrange it. It’s clinical, and you can dissect it. You can’t write a blog post with charts and infographics on how you figured out the perfect way to tap into the abstract human psyche. You need numbers, you need proof, you need hard data.

And so, while Facebook’s new focus may not do much for the clunky headline, at least it’s taking a small pin to the monstrously over-inflated headline industry running rampant in online marketing and suggesting that yes, headline discipline is now on the radar and it’s time to make changes.

My current writing has boring headlines. I pretty much say what the post is about. There’s no hook, unless you’re genuinely interested in the topic.

And that’s the way it should be.