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Alert: Avoid 3rd-party apps in posting to Facebook
Posted on September 14, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Frustrated when your social media results are less than you expected, especially on Facebook? 3rd-party applications could be your problem.
As it turns out, HootSuite and other 3rd-party applications carry serious negatives along with their benefits. Despite their ease of use and the time you save in posting content across social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), a recent study by EdgeRank Checker suggests that the Facebook algorithm often collapses, shrinks and reduces the importance of content entered via 3rd-party APIs.
Why is this a problem? When Facebook decides to treat your content with less importance, fewer viewers see it, which directly means less engagement—70-80% less engagement in comparison to content posted using Facebook’s own platform. If you’re not engaging with your target audience, then what is the point of having a social media presence in the first place?
Bottom line: Ditch 3rd-party apps when it comes to distributing content and handcraft your posts so they are optimized for Facebook (by far the most popular social media site in terms of viewer engagement). For instance, forget the hashtags and @ signs, they’re useless on Facebook, even though they’re what you need for Twitter.
You can find the original study located on EdgeRank Checker’s blog.
Comments
Comment from Dan September 16, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Thank you for reading my post, Theresa!
You nailed it! If you ever noticed that Facebook only displays a portion of the posts it is because their news feed is driven by an algorithm that helps decides which posts should be displayed or even hang around your friend’s feed longer (This is very similar to Google’s search algorithm). I also recommend to engage with your users because posts with “Likes” and comments tend to stay at the top of the news feed.
Comment from Devon September 19, 2011 at 12:31 pm
Very interesting, I had no idea! Thanks Dan.
Write a comment
Comment from Theresa September 16, 2011 at 10:03 am
Great post, Dan! When you say “Facebook decides to treat your content with less importance” do you mean that they weigh news feed results similar to Google search result pages?