Facebook is Working to Eliminate Clickbait—and You Won’t Believe What You Can Learn From This!

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By: Bulldog Reporter

Facebook announced last week it would tweak its timeline algorithms to weed out obnoxious “clickbait” posts. This is long overdue, as no doubt we’ve all become jaundiced from reading those breathless headlines that populate our screens, even if we don’t actually go for the bait and click through.

But reading how, exactly, the social media giant plans to do this offers an enlightening look at what qualifies as annoying to the vast number of people—and what communications pros and business professionals of all stripes can take away from that.

Headlines matter. Subject lines matter.

That’s nothing new. PR pros in particular know your headline or subject line must grab attention. But at the same time, they shouldn’t be coy, and shouldn’t leave readers scratching their heads. Nor should the story itself be unsubstantial, scarce on facts, incomplete or high in sensationalism. Because when you get right down to it, it’s not really the clickbait headline that so annoys us, but the fact that when you do click through, the article fails to deliver on the promise. That memory of having been burnt is what has turned us off to all such headlines.

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