Is your Facebook post being punished?

A few days ago Facebook quietly made an announcement that should have pretty big ramifications for both personal and business users of the platform. The social behemoth has set their eyes on 'engagement bait' - those spammy posts that blatantly beg for you to like, comment or share in an attempt to increase engagement and organically get the post seen by more and more people. Primarily, Facebook have heard their users complaints about the increasing amount of 'spammy' posts filling their newsfeed and are going to do something about it - using machine learning to identify these types of posts, stop them from being shown as much and eventually punish those pages that 'systematically' use this tactic.

Facebook started 'demoting' these types of posts earlier this week, but are rolling out the page-level demotion over several weeks to give those of us with Pages the chance to change our behaviour and not be caught out by the new model. What this means practically is that if you do own a Facebook page, you should definitely refrain from any type of 'baiting' type posts:

• Vote baiting - involves using the 'reaction' buttons to vote on different options
• React baiting - is just asking your followers to use the 'reaction' buttons in some way
• Share baiting - begging for your post to be shared
• Tag baiting - getting people to 'tag' a friend
• Comment baiting - is requesting your users comment in the posts

Recently there has been a real trend for the above type of baiting to be used by businesses for things like competitions and giveaways. These types of posts have always been a little bit borderline, so it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that they'll now likely be punished by the almighty Facebook algorithm!

Our advice - just cut the baiting out of your newsfeed completely. Create content that people are going to want to engage with, click and comment on without the baiting, and you'll not only do better by the algorithm, but you'll also actually be providing your followers with things they WANT to see - which at the end of the day is what social media is all about.

Below are some graphics from Facebook just setting out the various examples of baiting that will be clamped down and you can find Facebook's 'Fighting Engagement Bait' announcement here.