Making Quality Click-Bait

How to Do it in a Way that Doesn’t Piss People Off

I’ve been thinking a lot about why click-bait works.

Click-bait is one of the best examples of how storytelling works in social media. It is also one of the best examples of the ways marketers have abused their audiences. Let me explain…

Author Robert McKee has isolated the anatomy of a turning point in a story: 1) Surprise followed by 2) Curiosity, then 3) Insight morphing into 4) New Direction. (I write more in-depth about turning points here.)

Let’s apply that thinking to click-bait. I saw one example today that was hysterical:

I think The Verge were being a little tongue-in-cheek about this, obviously. But it works none-the-less! You hear that a man swallowed an SD card, and your reaction is, “What the hell?” You have that Surprise — the first stage of a turning point.

Immediately after you experience Curiosity. “What the hell happened after he swallowed the SD card?”

Of course, here is where any audience will hesitate to click because they’ve been burned so many times. So much click-bait has no Insight/NewDirection on the other side of the link. You’ve just primed me for a terrific payoff and instead have left me frustrated. (there’s a whole Twitter account dedicated to undercutting bullshit click-bait like this called Saved You A Click. Follow for a chuckle.)

We all know why marketers have behaved this way. They’re after clicks at the expense of all else. They don’t care if you actually gain anything from the experience after you click.

Don’t waste your audience’s freaking time.

If you’re gonna put out a piece of click-bait and you grab my Surprise/Curiosity, I’ll be pissed at you when you don’t pay it off with Insight. You better hope you’re a small enough brand that I’ll forget the transgression — larger brands don’t recover easily after betraying their audience’s trust like this.

The solution is to stop making click-bait just for clicks and instead produce click-bait that pays off with actual value to your audience.

When you click on the link in The Verge’s tweet, they immediately raise the stakes on you by saying that the swallowed card contained “the whole day’s worth of drone footage he’d just captured.” Whoa! Now I really want to know how this ends. (Props to The Verge, this piece of click-bait actually pays off. I won’t ruin it for you. Check it out for yourself.)

Robert McKee has a lesson he stresses to all his screenwriting students:

“No scene that doesn’t turn.”

That is to say that a good barometer for whether or not your script is working is to ask yourself whether or not there is a defined Turning Point in each scene that moves the story along.

Marketers can apply the same lesson to their daily micro-content (and of course the macro-content). Every piece of content you put out doesn’t need to be a complete three-act story in and of itself. That’s a common mistake (one I made for many years before realizing my error) and it will exhaust you to no end.

The rule is that every piece of content has to be a scene in your audience’s story.

“No content that doesn’t turn.”

This should be the social media marketer’s ideal. Imagine yourself scrolling down your Facebook or Twitter timeline, or watching your brand’s Snapchat story. Does your content Surprise you? Does it make you Curious? Great — you’ve got the first half (that’s the easier part).

Now for the hard part: the substance. Does the content pay off in some way? Does it deliver Insight and New Direction?

A great story makes the audience need to know how it ends. If you give them a good ending by providing Insight/New Direction, they will click again and again.