How Facebook clickbait draws users into engaging with posts – Phys.org

Blue thumbs-up icon. Credit: Jackson Sophat, Unsplash, CC0 (creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) A study of 4,000 Facebook posts by news organizations provides unique insights into clickbait and user engagement. The study, published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Anna-Katharina Jung, of the University of Duisburg-Essen, and colleagues, suggests both headlines and the text used in the posts can ‘bait’ users into interacting with a post, though some techniques are more successful than others. Clickbait in journalism is controversial: it can increase attention to articles, but some studies suggest it reduces trust in a source. The authors of the present study wanted to understand how specific features of clickbait in headlines and texts for news posts on Facebook influence user engagement, as measured by shares, comments and reactions. The team collected posts from seven consecutive days in late 2017 from ten U.S. and U.K. news outlets’ Facebook pages, including “reputable” and “tabloid” sources. At the time of the study, Facebook was the most important social network for news consumption. The researchers found that: Unusual punctuation in the headline was associated with up to 2.5 times more reactions, shares and comments. In the post text, however, it was associated with a decrease in…
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