Don’t you hate it when someone tags you under a Page post so they can enter a certain contest? Or seeing your News Feed populated with meaningless comment threads – such as “Type YES if you dislike Mondays as much as I do”?
It is understandable why people or Pages use it. More comments and shares on a post translate into a higher engagement rate. Higher engagement rate in turn translates into larger reach for that post.
Or so it was.
Exactly one year ago Facebook enabled their machine-learning model to recognize different kinds of engagement baiting.
Examples of engagement bait are comment-baiting, tag-baiting, share-baiting, vote-baiting or react-baiting. You can see some in the picture below.
Source: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/news-feed-fyi-fighting-engagement-bait-on-facebook/
To fight all these different kinds of engagement bait, Facebook algorithm now punishes people and Pages that use it. It tags them as spammers and it de-prioritises their posts. In other words, if you use engagement bait tactics, your or your Page’s posts won’t be showing much in newsfeeds anymore.
Originally, Facebook did it only for English language. But already by mid 2018, they implemented the model for 22 extra languages (Spanish, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, Bengali, Bulgarian, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Korean, Malay, Polish and Romanian).
To be honest, I feel relieved.
It does make my life as a Page admin tougher. But it also brings more fair-playground mentality onto this huge platform that receives such an enormous amount of our daily attention. Any little thing that consumes my time and attention, but is meaningless per se, steals away a few seconds of my life. So, good for you, Facebook, to address engagement bait! Keep up the good fight!
Source: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/news-feed-fyi-fighting-engagement-bait-on-facebook/
