Fed up of posts that beg for likes, comments and shares on Facebook? It looks like the social network is finally going to do something about it. Facebook recently announced that they would be demoting these engagement bait posts from individuals, as well as pages.
Just like clickbait posts, engagement bait posts are annoying and ruins your experience on the social network. Posts like “Like if you’re an Aries”, or “Tag a friend and don’t say anything” takes advantage of Facebook’s News Feed algorithm by boosting engagements in order to get greater reach. Starting this week, Facebook will start to penalise these post so they will be shown less in News Feed.
Facebook has reviewed and categorised hundreds of thousands of posts to teach its machine learning to detect different type of engagement posts. Facebook will be more strict towards Pages that systematically and repeatedly use engagement bait to artificially gain reach on its network. Don’t worry too much though, Facebook will roll out this Page-level demotion over the course of several weeks, so if you have been posting engagement bait posts, you should stop doing so right now.
The social network also notes that posts that ask people for help, advice or recommendations will not be penalised. Posts that helps circulate a missing child report, raising money for a cause, or asking for travel tips will not be adversely impacted by this update.
(Source: Facebook)
