Facebook Attempts to Fight Engagement Baiting

For brands, 2017 brought a lot of interference with regards to Facebook engagement and created a higher competition for posts to be seen. What caused this interference and often times lower engagement reach? Engagement baiting posts hold quite a bit of the blame. Not familiar with this term?  These posts are the ones that essentially beg for engagement directly on the post – i.e. likes or shares. Facebook has acknowledged the issue and has put a plan into place in order to combat engagement baiting.

Combating Engagement Baiting Facebook Posts

People go on Facebook every day, whether it’s to keep in touch with friends and family, to look for a job, or to look into a company (or product) before making a decision. After hearing complaints from numerous users that they were tired of “spam” posts, Facebook will be implementing stricter demotions for Pages who repeatedly use engagement bait and fake news tactics.

According to the Facebook newsroom they will “roll out this Page-level demotion over the course of several weeks to give publishers time to adapt and avoid inadvertently using engagement bait in the posts.” From this point forward, Facebook will continue finding ways to improve their efforts and reduce engagement baiting posts.

As with every rule, there is an exception. Facebook has noted that “Posts asking for help, advice, recommendations, circulating a missing child report, raising money for a cause, or asking for travel tips will not be adversely impacted by the update.”

How to Protect Your Page and Posts

A goal that Facebook has is to connect people with the stories they care about the most. So for businesses, this means creating content which provides information or creates an informative or meaningful experience for the expected audience. Based on user experiences, Facebook works on algorithms to understand what is considered sensational, spam, or misleading. This should also be a top priority when creating your content; publishing something that is false, or considered spam, creates consequences for your business aside from Facebook’s penalties for your Page.

Creating quality, reliable content that is also engaging isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Even if you had someone in-house working on your content, the chances of a detail being overlooked or forgotten is increased. It’s easier for these team members to be pulled away from their tasks and to ignore what is happening in the social media world.  Whereas having a marketing team on your side that creates meaningful content while keeping an eye on social trends and guidelines – much like Facebook’s publisher guidelines. Our professionals would love to discuss this, and our strategy for your brand, with you. Contact us to get started!