A few days ago, Facebook announced several improvements to their News Feed, mainly to eliminate stories that people see as spam or not relevant to them. They’ve been working on an update to reduce click-baiting headlines.
What are click-baiting headlines? These are headlines that tempt people to click on them in order to find out more, without givingmuch information about what the story is about. Usually, posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, so they get shown to more people and on a higher spot in the News Feed.
When asked people, Facebook developers found out that 80% of the users preferred to see headlines that gave them some clue about the full article, before they had to click and find out for themselves.
Generally, if people click on a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that it wasn’t relevant for them, and they didn’t find something that they wanted. The update will measure whether users came straight back to News Feed, helping Facebook to rank these stories in the News Feed.
Also, if users that clicked on a story shared it and discussed it on their Feed, it means it was relevant to them. But if relatively few people click Like or comment on the story, it suggests that they didn’t clicked on something that was valuable to them.