WARNING! ENGAGEMENT BAIT: CLICKBAIT
Hi, it’s Mike here from M Business and Tradie Directory Australia. In this episode, we’re going to talk about engagement bait. Join me now. Let’s get on with it.
CONTENT
Hey guys, Mike here from M Business and Tradie Directory Australia. Today I want to talk to you about clickbait.
ABOUT CLICKBAIT
What is clickbait?
Clickbait was actually a band brought in by Facebook in 2017, um, or even earlier and it was about posts that would get comments, shares, reactions, tagging, voting. It is like basically getting that by asking for it.
CLICKBAIT EXAMPLE
So it’s like saying get 10% off a product if you tag someone in this post. Or maybe something like they might have a picture of four different things and it’s an emotion, you know, an emotive on each one of those that says, choose your emotive in the comments below. Those are what’s called clickbait.
WHY IS IT CALLED A CLICKBAIT
Because it’s not a natural or organic straightway or a natural way that a person will like something.
HOW DID FACEBOOK REACT TO CLICKBAITS?
So Facebook decided that they would start to make a circumstance where if someone’s boosts doing clickbait, they would be penalized in their reach.
I’ll give you an example now. This is back in 2017. This is from a popular Higgins storm chasing, and he’s put up this, this post, and it says:
So just to, just a bit of a brief about what, what Higgins storm chasing was actually paved about what he would do. He would put “dot” the comments if you wanted more information about something or if you wanted to share something or if you wanted to agree with it or whatever else.
In Facebook’s eyes, what they were doing was they were actually click-baiting. So they put this big rant up and it says back then, Facebook, one of the charges, $2,100 per post to reach out 300,000 followers.
Oh my goodness! It must have been a while ago because now Higgins Storm Chasers have guidelines a lot more than that.
Now Facebook has put a stop on our “dots” and want to charge is 10,600 per post to reach just half of our followers and so, and it goes on and goes on.
Image source: https://www.facebook.com/HigginsStormChasing/photos/pcb.977623845666736/977613479001106/?type=3&theater
So then what was funny about, Higgins Stone Chasers. As they said,
“SO FB and there greedy money-hungry corporate and shareholders can go jump in the lake because HSC is now introducing the “F” for following! If you see this post in your news feeds type an “F” into comments, if we request an F into comments please help us by helping you bring the latest important weather updates. Without an F in comments, our posts average reach is just 25,000 out of 509,000.
Thank you 🙂 ***END RANT*** – SOURCE: Higgins Storm Chasing FB Page
So there were a lot of people that were really pissed with Facebook, bringing in this whole thing about clickbait and banning click-baiting.
But you still see it a lot today. You still see a lot of people putting things in their posts, like comment on the link below for a 10% discount or say for instance, share this post to receive, you know, to go into a competition for something or you know, react to this post and we’ll do this. Or you know what I mean?
HOW TO GET AROUND THE PENALTY OF CLICKBAITING
So how do you get around it or tag someone or whatever? How do you get around it?
It’s simple. I’ll go through the comment with commenting. If you want people to comment, ask them a question that’s different, that’s a different circumstance. You can say, “You know this year, what was your best holiday destination?
That’s a different scenario to biting someone because you were in a conversation, you’re not out of the conversation. You can do, instead of vote for the best or you can put something up, we now have polls.
You can actually do a poll. So that’s going to get you out of it. Get a reaction. Do good content and you will get reactions at the end of the day.
Share is exactly the same. So I think what you’ve gotta be careful with is this with Facebook and in regards to engagement on average, you only get a 2% engagement rate on any of your posts.
So, if you have a thousand fans on your Facebook page, what’s that? That means if someone if says, for instance, you might get 200 engagements on a really, really good thing if you’ve got a hundred people who like something you might get two hundred. So the more fans you have, the better off you are.
Should you pay Facebook to get more fans on your page?
So people have asked me, should we pay Facebook to get more fans on our page? Yes, you should.
Because more fans on your page means more engagement; unless you want to go down the advertising route. And that’s a completely different scenario.
CONCLUSION
Using your page as like a landing page and you’re advertising on Facebook to get the results that you want. But in regards to engagement baiting, really I think it just comes back down to being careful about what you’re trying to portray.
I think if you are doing engagement baiting, it’s because you’re trying to sell something and we go back to that conversation: “ No one wants to get sold to”.
I think Facebook had a gut full of all these posts that have come up to say, “You know, click on this or do this to get something in return.” It’s not really what Facebook is all about.
So I hope that’s, that’s been a little help to you. If you want to know more if you want to get a little bit more engagement. If you want to know some more information, we are holding a new course. It’s an updated 2020 Facebook for business course called Increased Sales on Facebook. It starts, you can go to our landing page, which is www.learnfbforbusiness.com.au, so you and find out some more details. But thanks so much for the week and we’ll talk to you very soon.
