Engagement Baiting and How To Overcome It

“Tag 3 friends!”

“Like this post!”

“Share now!”

In a bid to get more engagement for their Facebook posts, many brands might use such words to tell audiences to interact with their post. However, instead of acquiring more engagement, they might get even lower reach for your post instead.

Facebook prefers content that is inherently interesting or valuable to its audiences, which is why it has recently waged a war against engagement baiting. It considers engagement-baiting posts spammy and a way to game the Facebook algorithm for greater post engagement.

There are 5 types of engagement baiting.

1)    Vote Baiting – when you tell your audiences to ‘vote’ by leaving a specific reaction on a post

2)    React Baiting – when you tell your audiences the like/react to a post

3)    Share Baiting – when you tell your audiences to share a post

4)    Tag Baiting – when you tell your audiences to tag a friend on a post

5)    Comment Baiting – when you tell your audiences to leave a comment

By using posts with engagement-baiting languages, Facebook may lower the reach on the alleged posts. Pages that consistently do so might see significant drops in reach!

So, what can a brand do to avoid Engagement-baiting posts and yet reach out to its audiences?

Here’re the conventional means to reach out to a wider audience:

Paid Posts – Probably the most unpopular and yet obvious choice. With a lower organic reach per post, your post will likely NOT reach out to many people unless it has been boosted.

Content Quality – Creating content that your audience will appreciate is a key pillar of attracting engagement and getting more reach.

Here’s some less conventional means you can consider:

Place your instructions outside of Facebook – Some brands frequently hold giveaway contests, which require your audiences to engage with the post. Instead of putting the instructions directly on the Facebook page, consider driving the traffic to a landing page or info website. This way, your post won’t be labelled as engagement bait and you’ll also have more control over the contest criteria. For example, you can easily build an email database with a landing page.

Choose your words wisely – If you need to get people to like a post, it can be done without blatantly asking your audience to do so. For example, instead of saying “like our post”, you can say “don’t forget to give us a big thumbs up!”