A study of 4,000 Facebook posts by news organizations provides unique insights into clickbait and user engagement. The study, published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Anna-Katharina Jung, of the University of Duisburg-Essen, and colleagues, suggests both headlines and the text used in the posts can ‘bait’ users into interacting with a post, though some techniques are more successful than others.
Clickbait in journalism is controversial: it can increase attention to articles, but some studies suggest it reduces trust in a source. The authors of the present study wanted to understand how specific features of clickbait in headlines and texts for news posts on Facebook influence user engagement, as measured by shares, comments and reactions.
The team collected posts from seven consecutive days in late 2017 from ten U.S. and U.K. news outlets’ Facebook pages, including “reputable” and “tabloid” sources. At the time of the study, Facebook was the most important social network for news consumption.
The researchers found that:
Although it was not possible to investigate actual clicks because that information was not available, the study will be useful to those wanting to understand how to nudge users to interact with relevant news and which features do not directly grab a user’s attention.
The authors add: “Clickbait to make people click on a linked article is commonly used on social media. We analyze the impact of clickbait on user interaction on Facebook in the form of liking, sharing and commenting. For this, we use a dataset of more than 4,000 Facebook posts from 10 different news sources to analyze how clickbait in post headlines and in post text influences user engagement. While clickbait is commonly used, digital nudging is still on the rise and shares similarities with clickbait – yet being essentially different in its nature. The study discusses this common ground.”
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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE : https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0266743
Citation: Jung A-K, Stieglitz S, Kissmer T, Mirbabaie M, Kroll T (2022) Click me…! The influence of clickbait on user engagement in social media and the role of digital nudging. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0266743. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266743
Author Countries: Germany
Funding: The authors acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of the University of Duisburg-Essen. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
PLOS ONE
Observational study
People
Click me…! The influence of clickbait on user engagement in social media and the role of digital nudging
29-Jun-2022
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.