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Clickbait

Most of us are now probably familiar with the term ‘clickbait’, but for those who aren’t:

Clickbait is a term used to describe web content that has a primary purpose of generating online advertising revenue, often at the expense of accuracy and quality.  Clickbait is most commonly seen in the form of sensationalist headlines or eye-catching thumbnail pictures, used to entice users to click through.

If you use the internet you are sure to have seen clickbait, whether you realized it or not. An example of a clickbait would be:

‘This celebrity’s secret will blow your mind’

‘Mum reveals simple trick to getting rid of wrinkles that doctors are trying to keep quiet’

‘Wife comes home to find this… You’ll never believe what happened next’

Click bait is very common on the likes of Facebook, with many of these posts receiving a high number of likes and shares. Besides it being incredibly annoying, clickbait is not a tactic used by those with a respectable online presence as it is misleading and the user is left disappointed. It goes against a lot of ‘morals’ in the digital marketing world and is seen as dishonest, which is why we can’t wait to see the back of it!

You may think that users are wising up to clickbait tactics, but as digital marketing evolves, so is click baiting. The days of obviously misleading article titles and sensationalist photos are a thing of the past, with even YouTube for profit channels using clickbait video titles so more people will see the ads they are paid for (we’re looking at you, Zalfie).

Obvious Influencer Marketing

Using big names, such as the Kardashians, with huge fanbases to promote your products on their Instagram seems like a smart move. However, if not done carefully there are a lot of risks involved. It comes back to dishonesty.

For example: Scott Disick, Tom Felton and Naomi Campbell have all been victims of accidentally pasting instructions from the brands marketing companies into the captions of their images – yikes!

There are now rules on a lot of social media sites which requires somebody to state or hashtag that there is paid product promotion within the post. However, some fans do not realize the extent of how little input the celebrities actually have in the ads, and that their ‘recommendations’ a lot of the time aren’t their own words. So when the likes of Scott Disick accidentally posted the caption instructions on his Boo Tea Ads, there was a lot of backlash, with some people going as far as to say these paid advertisements are exploiting fans’ loyalty for money.

Buying likes/followers

Yes. This is still happening. And it is painfully obvious! Whilst immediately gaining, let’s say over 20,000 followers with little to no work done may be tempting, you are not gaining any engaged followers who care about and like what you post. The quality of your Social Network audience diminishes; in the same way as gaining a lot of back links from poor quality websites diminishes your trust flow and rankings.

40k followers and only 2 likes? Yeah, right.

Like baiting

Similar to click baiting, like-baiting is the practice of using controversial headlines and sensational language to stir up social attention for likes and shares rather than clicks. The content often has nothing to do with your business objectives and does not provide useful information. It may get some attention but it is bordering on spam and uses a lot of viewers’ morals/fears to try to prevent them from not liking or sharing the post. This is not recommended at all. Most audiences are seeing through this tactic now, and Facebook recently adjusted their rules to restrict these kinds of posts, too.