It is becoming increasingly popular for brands to increase engagements by requesting for like and shares. Although it’s becoming a trend for users who think it’s just a ‘trend’, many brands use this medium to drive traffic and increase engagements or followership. Facebook says it wants to put an end to this ‘engagement bait’.
Quite a number of the news feeds on my timeline are pages requesting for likes, shares and quite common is one asking people to type ‘Amen’. This norm is quite annoying. A typical example is ‘Tag a friend who will be a beautiful bride in 2018′. Another will typically come as a prophecy with a cloned popular pastor and will typically end with ‘type amen and share’.
Facebook has decided to crackdown on such posts, saying that they will be shown ‘less’ in News Feed. ‘To help us foster more authentic engagement, teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized hundreds of thousands of posts to inform a machine learning model that can detect different types of engagement bait’, the company said in a blog post.
This new development is part of Facebook’s move to stop spam. This effect also includes sponsored ads. Adverts which do not have quality web pages and have images considered to be disruptive, malicious and shocking will be seen by only fewer people. And in some cases, ads that look suspicious will be prevented from going live.
The social media firm said further that brands that wish to engage their users should do so with relevant and useful posts as strict measures will be taken on repeat offenders. Nevertheless, this excludes posts asking for help, recommendations, and advice.
This way, users can have control to an extent to the News Feeds displayed on their timelines. Just a few days ago, the social media giant rolled out a 30-day mute button for pages, groups, and people and as usual, the people or pages whose notifications you have muted will not be notified about the action.
Facebook users we do not have the right to the kinds of adverts that appear on our timelines; it’s therefore only logical that there should be a limit to the News Feeds that flood users’ timelines, especially those soliciting for likes and shares with no meaningful stories.
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