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Facebook's comment counting will put news stories out for the count

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By Craig McGill | MD/Creative Guy

August 26, 2014 | 4 min read

So Facebook has announced another revamp to fight linkbait tactics on the site and this one may have impact on genuine media in terms of hits and financially, while making Facebook more cash.

Let's go through the article for those who didn't click on the link:

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.

Now that misses out a few things that matter: People can click on links and leave them open to read later, it may be a short read, they may have been distracted or may be a quick visual story - not every story needs to be 1000 words long (even if Google is trying to nudge people that way).

But there's another challenge for content creators:

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.

This could be quite the issue. The vast majority of people don't share, like or comment stories. They just read them and that's it.

How PRs, SEO, journalists and marketeers needs to change their content

If Facebook is serious about this, this means the content creators themselves are going to have to rethink what they do in an age when many already worry about the declining number of comments that material receives.

You can expect to see more articles that press psychological buttons encouraging you to share or comment. Strangely enough, this actually plays nicely into the old journalism tactic of having every story be a row.

At the same time, let's not kid ourselves on - this also plays nicely into Facebook's hands because if they are removing editorial content from the newsfeed, the only way a larger audience will be exposed to it is if the content creators pay for increased exposure.

Is the average user the winner here? No, it's Facebook

Facebook can't be blamed for trying to make more profit - and equally it's good that they are trying to improve the user experience - but at a fundamental level, all content created - from the first newspaper to the press release that was sent two minutes ago - is a form of linkbait and clickbait. The writing, from the headline down, has always been a battle for eyeballs and attention.

In fact, with headlines like News Feed FYI: Click Baiting dare I suggest Facebook could do with a hand in crafting good clickable headlines...

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