There are signs that a revolt against clickbait may be coming. Earlier this fall, Facebook gave one of the clearest definitions of clickbait in a post explaining how they were cracking down on the practice: “‘Clickbait’ is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see.”

While Facebook isn’t going to read every headline and penalize brands accordingly, they are going to penalize links that fail to hold user attention, explaining: “If [users] click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted.”

This is the kind of content that’s counterproductive for brand publishers to post. After all, the objective of brand publishing isn’t to get empty clicks—it’s to build relationships with people. But how can brands strike the balance between creating shareable, compelling content and manipulating readers for clicks?

A great start is by understanding the nature of clickbait and some of its consequences.

Why do we even click?

The clickbait technique is old hat. At its core, it’s the combination of journalism content and catchy headline copywriting, not unlike how the six o’clock news teases its upcoming reports on fatalities, scares, and threats. The media is built on emotions (hence the pre-Internet controversy over sensationalist newspapers), and the most effective companies figure out which ones trigger the greatest degree of reader engagement.

Granted, there are varying degrees in the gradient of clickbait. Some publishers create high-quality content and smartly package it with a compelling headline, while other publishers succeed at leveraging the curiosity gap but don’t deliver on the promise they’ve made, leaving the reader disappointed.

The amount of content that fits the latter category is growing. Today, the Internet largely rewards listicles and snazzy headlines riding the coattails of recent news. Albeit short, catchy, and cute, the content is often an attempt to take advantage of your core emotions, like fear, guilt, love, pride, greed, and belonging. Clickbait is pretty easy to identify. As Vox’s acting managing editor, Nilay Patel, writes:

Upworthy’s now-infamous ‘You’ll never guess what happened next’ headline construction is a one-question pop quiz; a call for the reader to actually guess what happened next, and then verify that guess by reading the article. It creates value because there’s a chance you’ll be rewarded with the smug satisfaction of being right. (And if even you’re not, you still get to share that question on Facebook to trick your friends.)

For a deeper understanding of clickbait, The American Reader’s Michael Reid Roberts breaks down the grammar of Upworthy’s headlines:

The key element in these titles is the relationship between the first sentence and the second. The first is relatively traditional, while the second sentence is short, annoyingly informal, and conspiratorial. We might call these couplets epodal because of the relative line lengths, but I think the effect is more similar to catalexis in that the second line’s brevity emphasizes something unfinished or incomplete. The second sentence is intentionally vague: click here to finish the thought, answer the question, solve the riddle! And, like most unfinished stories, the conclusion is rarely satisfying.

As Roberts writes, clickbait becomes distasteful when it fails to deliver on the intensity of emotion that the headline promises. “Most clickbait is disappointing because it’s a promise of value that isn’t met—the payoff isn’t nearly as good as what the reader imagines,” Patel said in an interview with Poynter. “BuzzFeed headlines pay off particularly well because they actually make fairly small promises and then over-deliver. It’s validating, which is maybe the most valuable payoff of them all.”

Ultimately, the line between simply crafting compelling headlines and resorting to clickbait can be murky. But if brands care about delighting readers instead of disappointing them, toeing that line is extremely important. And that’s why brands need to pay attention to metrics like engaged time, average finish, and bounce rate to determine whether they’re delivering on the promises they make to their audience.

It’s also why brands overemphasizing vanity social metrics can be dangerous.

Reading ≠ Sharing

A large part of the appeal of clickbait is that it’s designed to turn readers into a word-of-mouth marketing tool, spreading content far and wide. While that’s great, shares can be awfully misleading. Why? Because people don’t always read the content they share.

This spring, Chartbeat studied tens of thousands of articles and found “no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content.”

It’s an intriguing dynamic, and one that Betaworks’ John Borthwick explained in humorous fashion on Medium:

However, Chartbeat also found that if websites “can hold a visitor’s attention for just three minutes, they are twice as likely to return than if you only hold them for one minute.”

Why is this important? Because it tells us that optimizing for sharing can be dangerous, as many people who share your content might not be very likely to return. It can also lead you down the path of creating content that’s only meant to be shared, not read. As BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said in an interview with financial journalist Felix Salmon:

I love metrics and I love thinking about optimization, but I think that the optimal state is being slightly suboptimal because as soon as you try to actually optimize, particularly for a single metric, you end up finding that the best way to optimize for that metric ends up perverting the metric and making the metric mean the opposite of what it used to mean.

People will always want entertainment, but brand publishers can—and should—choose to be less P. T. Barnum and more Walt Disney. Brands that continue down the road of clickbait risk becoming momentary distractions that fail to build high-quality relationships with readers. By all means, write compelling headlines. But also be sure that your content delivers.

This article originally appeared on Contently.

The post Why Clickbait Is Dangerous for Brands appeared first on Relevance.

And as Contently Editor-in-Chief Joe Lazauskas wrote last week, “These numbers are even more striking when you consider engagement is significantly down even though brands are almost certainly spending more money to promote their posts to combat plummeting organic reach. Facebook’s ad revenue reached $2.27 billion in Q1 2014, up 82 percent from Q1 2013.”

To reach the same engagement, brands will likely need to spend even more. But is it worth it—especially when you consider that Facebook may shake down brands even more in the future?

There are alternatives to renting an audience on Facebook, and while they might not be as sexy as the major social network, they do allow brands to expand their reach and make the most out of their investments. Here are four steps you can take to wean yourself off relying on the social network:

1. Own your audience through email

As the social media landscape gets noisier and nosier, email marketing is making a comeback, with some companies seeing up to 60 percent open rates (or even 85 percent in some cases). Myspace co-founder Jason Hirschhorn’s new business, primarily built around a newsletter, raised millions in funding. Bestselling author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss recently added opt-ins above the fold on his website.

Having an email list also allows you to connect with your community on a granular level and strike up conversations with individual consumers. On Facebook, you can’t access each person’s individual profile; in fact, you have no idea who the actual fans of your page are, and when it comes to organic reach, you’re at the mercy of Facebook’s whims.

The challenge in growing your email list is making the content so good that people want to forward it to their colleagues and friends, and doing all the little things on your website to maximize sign-ups—see this great guide from HubSpot. (Editor’s Note: Contently has also found that Twitter lead-gen cards are a great way to attract new email subscribers.)

Once your email list starts growing, it will be a powerful asset for your brand. More importantly, the data is yours and can be securely tucked into your company’s servers—not in the hands of some social network.

2. Take your email list social

You can also use a prospect’s email to connect with their social profiles, making your email list the gift that keeps on giving. By using a service such as Full Contact, you can access information about each of your subscribers’ Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts—assuming that they’re registered under the same email address.

This information will enable you to get in touch with audience members on individual levels via multiple social networks. You can also follow audience members on these channels and see the kind of content that they are sharing.

3. Create your own community—and community chest of data

Although most brands are active on social media, they’re also starting to understand the value of building their own communities through their own platforms. A few months ago, Sephora built its own Instagram-like platform called the Beauty Board. Coca-Cola also has a platform dedicated to football (soccer) fans. And American Express has created a vibrant community of small business owners through OPEN Forum. (Full disclosure: both AmEx and Coca-Cola are Contently clients.)

Communities deliver not only basic membership data such as email addresses and first and last names, but also user-behavior data. You can understand what types of posts resonate with your core users, which topics they’re passionate about, and what they couldn’t care about less. You can spend more time with the users that actually matter—the ones that will become advocates for your brand—instead of trying to interact with everyone, and get crucial feedback that will inform your content strategy.

4. Create a mobile or web app

With your own app, you can gain the ability to start pushing notifications to users through their mobile devices. Given how the majority of mobile phone users have smartphones, and how mobile drives 30 percent of traffic (and 15 percent of sales), connecting with users on this medium is becoming increasingly crucial.

Ion interactive co-founder and CTO, Scott Brinker, is bullish on mobile and web apps—so much so that he bet his entire company on it. Just make sure you focus on something that your audience actually needs. As Brinker wrote in a blog post:

“Marketing apps can be things like wizards, configurators, calculators, assessment tools, contests, interactive white papers, games, quizzes, surveys, guided tours, portals, social hubs, diagnostics, workbooks, galleries, utilities, sweepstakes, learning exercises — any kind of digital experience that actively engages prospects in a helpful or entertaining way.”

Closing thoughts

GigaOM columnist Mathew Ingram closes his article about Facebook with a warning about gaining momentum on the major social network: “While it feels great to be riding that wave, you never know how long the ride will last, or how suddenly it might dry up and leave you stranded.”

Whether Facebook is simply refining its algorithm or just trying to encourage brands to try paid solutions, it’s evident that brands are losing control of their content on the platform, and as a result, losing touch with their consumers. Take control by investing in your own infrastructure and connecting directly with your audience.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.

This post originally appeared on Contently’s The Content Strategist.

The post 4 Ways Brands Can Battle Facebook’s Fast-Decreasing Organic Reach appeared first on Relevance.