Aug

Small Business Social Media Manager Helps You Keep Up

A small business social media manager helps you keep up with all of the changes and modifications that are happening on the social media platforms.

This week has been another week for big changes on Facebook.

They have made two major announcements, both of which I personally am very happy about.

Facebook wants you the user to easily find what you are looking for and to have only relevant information show up in your newsfeed.

The two updates are:

1) Reduce click-baiting headlines,

2) Help people see links shared on Facebook in the best format.

First off, what is click baiting?

Here is the definition from wikipedia:

Clickbait is a pejorative term describing web content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks. Clickbait headlines typically aim to exploit the “curiosity gap“, providing just enough information to make the reader curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content.

Sites that have been described as using click-bait marketing techniques include Upworthy^[2]^[4] and the Huffington Post.

Here is how Facebook will determine what looks like a click-bait.

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.

Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends. If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.

Shared Links in the Newsfeed

In the past most people will insert the link when creating the post, let Facebook work it’s magic and populate the post with whatever the link takes us too AND then remove the link. I personally have done this a number of times, the reason is the link can be super long and ugly.

Here is the update from Facebook:

We’ve found that people often prefer to click on links that are displayed in the link format (which appears when you paste a link while drafting a post), rather than links that are buried in photo captions. The link format shows some additional information associated with the link, such as the beginning of the article, which makes it easier for someone to decide if they want to click through. This format also makes it easier for someone to click through on mobile devices, which have a smaller screen.

With this update, we will prioritize showing links in the link-format, and show fewer links shared in captions or status updates.

The best way to share a link after these updates will be to use the link format. In our studies, these posts have received twice as many clicks compared to links embedded in photo captions. In general, we recommend that you use the story type that best fits the message that you want to tell – whether that’s a status, photo, link or video.