What is Clickbait Mechanism and How to Use it?

These headlines and descriptions, known as clickbait, are most used on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The idea is to make the article irresistible by exploiting the reader through shock, excitement, humor, or curiosity. News pages, blogs or online magazines are the most common use place of this mechanism because these pages are measured by click rate and need traffic to be as high as possible to sell ad space.

Advantages

Let’s take a look at some of the pros.

More page views

It should come as no surprise that more page views are the biggest advantage to this type of content. If the views are your only goal, then clickbait is the perfect way to get them.

Increased brand awareness

Another aspect of clickbait is the shares. It follows that more people will be reached by your brand as your content spreads across the internet. Increasing brand awareness is crucial to content marketing, and creating fascinating clickbait is a terrific way to do it.

It is great for building links

Since clickbait publishers focus on social media sharing to boost their visibility and readership, they are effectively letting their users do their link-building for them – and of course, the bigger and more natural your backlink profile is, the more visibility and traffic you can expect from search.

Disadvantages

Let’s not forget about the disadvantages as well.

Disappointing the visitors

Promising something to be “astonishing” or “unbelievable” runs the chance of not living up to expectations. Since you are not onto a quick fix for global warming, chances are it does not warrant the description of “unbelievable”. Another example is promising something to be the “cheapest”, only to discover the price is average.

Lowering trust

Brand building should be an integral part of your plan. Nothing damages a brand more than low approval rates. People will simply start avoiding your brand if they start associating it with deceptive clickbait titles that do not deliver what they promised.

You run the risk of Google penalties

Google values the quality of your content far more than the quantity you are posting. Previous algorithm updates have proven that they are committed to providing high quality search results for their users, even if that means handing out ‘ranking penalties’ for thin content. Google is enough smart to know if you are single-eyed duping people into reading and sharing content which does not serve their needs.