How Facebook is Tackling Inauthentic Marketing Tactics

Tag a friend who’s been fishing for Facebook likes!

Wait… What?

We’ve all seen these sorts of enhancement encouraging posts on our feed, most often from businesses, but did you know Facebook has been cracking down on these types of spam? Facebook’s most recent move began last week when they announced that they will now be demoting posts that fish for attention– that means asking for shares, likes, comments, or follows. Whether you’ve only seen these techniques or you’ve been employing them yourself, you’re about to start seeing a lot less of them.

What kind of posts exactly do we mean? Well, anything outright asking the audience to engage. “Tag a friend who ___”, “Share this if___”, or “Like if you agree” are popular key phrases to be aware of when it comes to this change. If you find yourself using these lines often in your own strategy, it’s time to start reconsidering and reworking them. Altogether dropping them is the simplest, and recommended, course of action as it’s unclear how strict of a punishment Facebook’s algorithm will place on posts containing them.

The motive behind this change is to encourage authentic user interaction, not just asking for attention, but earning the genuine interest and engagement from users. For audiences, this should mean fewer spam posts in their feed, and hopefully a switch towards genuine, quality content. For businesses, this means focusing on genuine content and significant posts in place of the worn-out engagement fishing tactics.

This change should be taking place over the next few weeks, so now is the time to start preparing for it. It’s among a variety of other focuses in Facebook’s attempt to cut down on spam, also including a temporary mute button that can be used on people, pages, and groups, demoting clickbait and websites deemed to be low quality, and even avoiding links to sites with ads considered to be in poor taste or disruptive. To learn more or for help in embracing these changes, contact i3 today!