Does Using Hootsuite Kill your Edgerank?
For quite some time I’ve been preaching to people not to use 3rd party API platforms like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Sprout Social, NetworkedBlogs and etc to post updates to your Facebook page and other social media platforms.
The reason is if a fan is following other pages that use the platform you run the risk of them getting a link on their newsfeed that is something like “See 40 more posts from Hootsuite”.
Which would require them to click the link to see all the posts. And let’s be honest, the average user is not going to click it. Only those that have dived deep into social media even know about this.
So your carefully crafted posts did not get seen by the majority of your fans afterall.
The staff over at EdgeRankChecker did a very indepth study and the results were pretty damaging for Hootsuite and other 3rd party platforms that most social media managers are using.
They found that there was a 70% drop in engagement per fan when you used 3rd party APIs!!! This is insane! Especially since Hootsuite recently rolled out new Facebook features to their social media platform.
According to Edgerank here is what the study involved:
We ran our analysis on 1,000,000+ Updates on 50,000+ Pages that influence over 1,000,000,000+ Fans. We took each individual post and analyzed the engagement (comment & likes) along with how many fans the Page had at the moment of updating. The result is a percentage that represents engagement per fan per post. Our sample size ranged per API, although we cut it off at the Top 10 APIs outside of Facebook.
So as you can see this was no small study at all. I’m not sure why this is surprising news. As the study states I’ve always assumed that posts from 3rd party API’s aren’t optimized for Facebook and get collapsed or bunched in with other posts. Thus making those posts have a lower engagement and edgerank, seeing as hardly anyone is seeing it.
Here is a full breakdown showing you the engagement percentage of each 3rd party API. You’ll notice that they all are at least 70% less than posting right onto Facebook itself:
This decrease is major and in my opinion if you are using any of these to automate posts to your Facebook page STOP NOW!! Because you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Take the time to post manually to your page. Still use the platforms to reply to posts and comments and post to Twitter (because Twitter doesn’t care how you use her!)
If you want to see more of the results go HERE
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Well, that post planner is a joke. I thought it looked cool, tried it. Few hours later--fb disables the app. They get it back up & running, but now every post says "via post planner" and those posts are now getting buried. I just saw on my wall "See one more post from Post Planner." Thanks for playing, nice try.
Most people are only going to see the "10 more" if there they have a ton of pages using the same application or if you're posting waaaaaay to many updates in a short amount of time. Then it's going to condense them.
Scott thanks for our insight with this post...I tend to agree, seeing the "10 or more" like
stories under posts, minimizes engagement, since the posting "app" is
always referred, in the case of the example above, Hootsuite. But what
about your own customized/branded app and using the Sendible white-label
option? Your post may be automated via the "sendible" engine, but it
gets posted via your custom installed app on Facebook. I would think
that if YOU'RE the only one with the actual app that says "via YOUR
COMPANY APP" than you wouldn't feel the penalization of the "hootsuite"
dilemma (thousands of users versus one)...thoughts?
Hi Lisa, yep Facebook disabled our app because of a bunch of spammers who abused our app. You were unlucky to sign-up just a few hours before it happened. The "via Post Planner" footer will show up as long as you use regular PP indeed. As I said above, only our White Label users get the "via your brand" tagline. Hope this clarifies? Hit me on julie at postplanner dot com if you have any questions.
Post Planner works great for me. But I use the white label version.
Well, that post planner is a joke. I thought it looked cool, tried it. Few hours later--fb disables the app. They get it back up & running, but now every post says "via post planner" and those posts are now getting buried. I just saw on my wall "See one more post from Post Planner." Thanks for playing, nice try.
Go to www.edgerankchecker.com ~Scott
How do you check your EdgeRank?
That's true.. unless you use the White Label version of Post Planner - Post updates won't collapse in the newsfeed and as you know, you'll get a branded footer too ;-)
Well more than anything the point to me is that if you are using these sites to posts updates to Facebook pages there is a huge likelihood your fans aren't seeing the post. Which decreases the chance of them interacting with your page. ~Scott
Great Post! I've recently found this too, where the study was done and it showed that when you automatically posting to especially Facebook people don't engage or comment as much.
Oh I check it and it's always well above what they say is good. But I just never saw an increase when I was solely hand-posting to fb. I do a mix and have been for over a month, prior to that I spent the entire summer hand-posting. No change. I check it--I've just never had anyone ask me what it is.
Lisa you need to be checking your EdgeRank. It's what determines whether or not posts show up in your fans' newsfeed. ~Scott
FB is really smart - they want you to see their advertisements and will "reward" you by logging in to post.
Most people are only going to see the "10 more" if there they have a ton of pages using the same application or if you're posting waaaaaay to many updates in a short amount of time. Then it's going to condense them.
I don't use any of them for Facebook, only Twitter.
Yes, I agree...seeing the "10 or more" like stories under posts, minimizes engagement, since the posting "app" is always referred, in the case of the example above, Hootsuite. But what about your own customized/branded app and using the Sendible white-label option? Your post may be automated via the "sendible" engine, but it gets posted via your custom installed app on Facebook. I would think that if YOU'RE the only one with the actual app that says "via YOUR COMPANY APP" than you wouldn't feel the penalization of the "hootsuite" dilemma (thousands of users versus one)...thoughts?
Not to mention--I've never had any company that I've ever worked with ask me for my Edge Rank. They've asked to see my google analytics, my Klout, my PR, my Alexa........but never EdgeRank.
I am not sure why anyone uses HootSuite, it just looks lazy. In addition, it is VERY easy to block HootSuite all together from Facebook feeds, so some of your audience may not even be seeing your posts.
I use hootsuite--and actually I dropped networked blogs for the reasons listed in the article. It is my understanding, and has been my experience, that hootsuite is the only one of these services that doesn't get buried, and allows for some engagement because you can add comments.
I assume the results would be similar for Seesmic but I didnt see that in the comparison graphic.
Man I saw this coming. I see some larger fan pages using hootsuite and it kills the engagement when it says "See 10 more"
Scott thanks for our insight with this post...I tend to agree, seeing the "10 or more" like
stories under posts, minimizes engagement, since the posting "app" is
always referred, in the case of the example above, Hootsuite. But what
about your own customized/branded app and using the Sendible white-label
option? Your post may be automated via the "sendible" engine, but it
gets posted via your custom installed app on Facebook. I would think
that if YOU'RE the only one with the actual app that says "via YOUR
COMPANY APP" than you wouldn't feel the penalization of the "hootsuite"
dilemma (thousands of users versus one)...thoughts?
The fact that Facebook are now grouping posts together is true, but this is only happening if a user filters their news feed by “Most Recent”. Having said that, we have not seen a drop-off of engagement with Sendible users. In fact, our users seem to be getting better engagement ratios when posting using Sendible under their own branding, than on Facebook directly.
One of our users is the largest gaming company in the world with over 50 million Facebook fans and they are posting using Sendible, but under their own branding. They have seen higher levels of engagement than they would've seen had they been posting manually on Facebook.
Gavin,
So, although this large game company is one example, is it safe to assume that utilizing customized app branding, when using a social management tool such as Sendible, is a wiser choice for improved engagement versus just using the Sendible app directly?
Is there any chance at producing a white paper or a study/report, based upon a larger set of Sendible users, utilizing their own branding and what their overall engagement % is? That would be interesting to see, although I'm not sure how you would compare that versus directly posting on Facebook.
RE: Facebook grouping posts together - I had thought from reading this post and others, that the grouping occurred because of the referring app and URL domain being similar, but does anyone know definitively how it's grouped together? Based upon URL, app or other??
Thanks for the response Gavin...
Ed
It groups based on the app posting to Facebook. But it all depends on what pages people are following. So for someone like me that has Liked 100s of pages if say 15 of them are using Hootsuite for example all of their posts will end up getting bunched together. If a person isn't following alot of pages that use the 3rd party apps they may never notice it.
That's why it seems so arbitrary at times and it's an issue you can't replicate well.
It groups based on the app posting to Facebook. But it all depends on what pages people are following. So for someone like me that has Liked 100s of pages if say 15 of them are using Hootsuite for example all of their posts will end up getting bunched together. If a person isn't following alot of pages that use the 3rd party apps they may never notice it.
That's why it seems so arbitrary at times and it's an issue you can't replicate well.
Conversation from Facebook
Hi Lisa, yep Facebook disabled our app because of a bunch of spammers who abused our app. You were unlucky to sign-up just a few hours before it happened. The "via Post Planner" footer will show up as long as you use regular PP indeed. As I said above, only our White Label users get the "via your brand" tagline. Hope this clarifies? Hit me on julie at postplanner dot com if you have any questions.
Post Planner works great for me. But I use the white label version.
Well, that post planner is a joke. I thought it looked cool, tried it. Few hours later--fb disables the app. They get it back up & running, but now every post says "via post planner" and those posts are now getting buried. I just saw on my wall "See one more post from Post Planner." Thanks for playing, nice try.
Go to www.edgerankchecker.com ~Scott
How do you check your EdgeRank?
That's true.. unless you use the White Label version of Post Planner - Post updates won't collapse in the newsfeed and as you know, you'll get a branded footer too ;-)
Well more than anything the point to me is that if you are using these sites to posts updates to Facebook pages there is a huge likelihood your fans aren't seeing the post. Which decreases the chance of them interacting with your page. ~Scott
Great Post! I've recently found this too, where the study was done and it showed that when you automatically posting to especially Facebook people don't engage or comment as much.
Oh I check it and it's always well above what they say is good. But I just never saw an increase when I was solely hand-posting to fb. I do a mix and have been for over a month, prior to that I spent the entire summer hand-posting. No change. I check it--I've just never had anyone ask me what it is.
Lisa you need to be checking your EdgeRank. It's what determines whether or not posts show up in your fans' newsfeed. ~Scott
FB is really smart - they want you to see their advertisements and will "reward" you by logging in to post.
Most people are only going to see the "10 more" if there they have a ton of pages using the same application or if you're posting waaaaaay to many updates in a short amount of time. Then it's going to condense them.
I don't use any of them for Facebook, only Twitter.
Yes, I agree...seeing the "10 or more" like stories under posts, minimizes engagement, since the posting "app" is always referred, in the case of the example above, Hootsuite. But what about your own customized/branded app and using the Sendible white-label option? Your post may be automated via the "sendible" engine, but it gets posted via your custom installed app on Facebook. I would think that if YOU'RE the only one with the actual app that says "via YOUR COMPANY APP" than you wouldn't feel the penalization of the "hootsuite" dilemma (thousands of users versus one)...thoughts?
Not to mention--I've never had any company that I've ever worked with ask me for my Edge Rank. They've asked to see my google analytics, my Klout, my PR, my Alexa........but never EdgeRank.
I am not sure why anyone uses HootSuite, it just looks lazy. In addition, it is VERY easy to block HootSuite all together from Facebook feeds, so some of your audience may not even be seeing your posts.
I use hootsuite--and actually I dropped networked blogs for the reasons listed in the article. It is my understanding, and has been my experience, that hootsuite is the only one of these services that doesn't get buried, and allows for some engagement because you can add comments.
I assume the results would be similar for Seesmic but I didnt see that in the comparison graphic.
Man I saw this coming. I see some larger fan pages using hootsuite and it kills the engagement when it says "See 10 more"
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