Facebook Engagement Bait: What you need to know

If you are not familiar with the concept of Engagement Bait, it’s pretty simple. A set of tactics used by many publishers to boost their engagement in order to get a greater reach by using some of Facebook basic interactions (reactions, shares, comments, tagging, etc).

Facebook News Room image — Engagement Bait

We all like/need more reactions, comments and shares to get out there, it gets harder and harder to reach new audiences, especially when there’re so many brands and people posting new contents everyday. But the thing is, with all these engagement bait tactics, what’re we doing is misusing the tools and features that Facebook provide us. Reactions are not meant to make polls or voting, sharing a content should be about someone who wants to tell their friends; hey look at this! how interesting, or how stupid, or whatever. Comments are there to get opinions, to debate, not to make people comment so your posts gets boosted. You get the idea right?

So in a few words: Don’t Do it. Don’t try to trick Facebook, of course they know this is happening and at the end of the day they always take actions about things like this.

Engagement bait is just a lazy excuse to not generate great content.
Be better than that!

What’s gonna happen?

Over the coming weeks, Facebook will start implementing stricter demotions for Pages that systematically and repeatedly use engagement bait to gain a greater reach.

Teams have reviewed and categorized hundreds of thousands of posts to inform a machine learning model that will be detecting different kinds of engagement bait. Posts that use this tactics will be shown less and less in the News Feed.

Facebook News room image — Engagement bait

For more official information visit:
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/news-feed-fyi-fighting-engagement-bait-on-facebook/

Originally published at strategybeast.com on December 21, 2017.