Clickbait - Good or Bad?
Clickbait has built a bad name for itself over the years and more people are aware of the disinformation and potential fake news. According to a report over 55% of US adults shared that their government should take steps to reduce the amount of wrong information on the internet. However, the amount of clickbait continues to grow which is believed to not only cause problems for consumers but also for the marketers.
It's not surprising that most marketers don't consider clickbait in their strategy. Still, there are benefits to producing content that garners a high level of interaction.
Clickbait according to Google,
(on the internet) content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.
Clickbait is content that is created solely with the intention of encouraging or attracting click-throughs which can include a range of different media formats like videos, blogs, news articles, etc. It is primarily determined by the attention-grabbing headline or brief remark used hooking visitors to click on the link and find out more.
Psychological tricks are used for the clickbait to work where it persuades people to click through and find out more info. This is taking advantage of human psychology making them feel like they would be losing out if they didn't check out.
Sales messaging and clickbait have a key difference and that is clickbait doesn't directly sell to the reader. Companies who do clickbait might make them look spammy, cheap, or untrustworthy. They might get traffic leading to sales but it also has the drawback of hurting your brand in terms of making you look spammy, cheap, or untrustworthy.
Clicks don't mean engagement. If a visitor comes through your page, they might leave right away without staying long enough to engage with your content. Therefore, your page might have high bounce rates.
Clickbait doesn't mean quality as well and a lot of clickbait doesn't deliver what it promises leading to disappointment and dissatisfaction.
However, there are certain things to keep in mind if you want to take advantage of clickbait like identifying key trends, don't share fake news, appealing to customers' emotions, making your content valuable, etc.
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Some of them might not be suitable for big brands, but I think for most social media content, their use have more pros than cons, even when talking about the "bad" ones.