The effect of clickbait on our perceptions
I always say to myself that I am not sensitive to clickbaiting headlines on social media platforms. Being a well educated BIM-student, I must be able to distinguish valuable news feed from the feed that solely aims to have the most views. However, there is always a part of me that wants to check out whether my assessment of a certain headline was correct, resulting in me quickly scanning the news article anyway. Most of the times, the article is not even close to be as interesting as the headline promised. Many popular websites make use of clickbaiting headlines, but what effect does it have on perceived brand value?
Whereas many companies across different industries seek to build a sustainable relationship with their customers through great customer experience and listening to the customer voice, websites like BuzzFeed are solely aiming to increase the number of page visits. Although it results in many followers on the corresponding social media accounts, the relationship is not build on trust. Followers might as well switch to a different platform the next day. Hence, using misleading headlines can harm a companies value significantly.
Even though customers create more relationships with brands than previous decades, since it is much easier to connect via social media platforms, customer’s time is bounded to a certain amount of time per day. If you are seeking to get customer’s attention, and make sure that they spend some of their valuable time on your platform, you should not focus on the short visits like I described in the beginning. Clickbait results in the wrong visitors – visitors that are not necessarily part of the segment you are targeting – and low retention rates. In conclusion, to create a sustainable relationship with your customers and to benefit from the resulting network effects, you should consider using the traditional headlines: honest yet appealing, trustworthy yet creating curiosity. This will retain your customers and prevent them from leaving to new entrant.
Sources:
5 Reasons Clickbait Is The Worst (And How It Will Negatively Impact Your Business)
https://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-harm-caused-by-a-bad-headline
I think clickbait and the whole fake news discussion is extremely relevant in today’s media. There’s still a lot of work to do on raising awareness among the public on how to distinguish the ‘real’ from the ‘fake’. It was new to me that using these kind of techniques could harm brand value, which I think is a good development. We should strive to bring valuable information into the world each day! Florian, thanks for sharing. Never gonna give you up.