I admit, I’ve been on a bit of a tear about autoposting lately.
The thing is, the older social media becomes, and the deeper we fall down the rabbit hole, the more people there are that want the “magic social media bullet.” I have literally had potential clients say to me “I want all the rewards of social media without having to put in the effort.” But it just doesn’t work that way.
I’m a big fan of Hootsuite. I just got my certification, in fact! Which is very exciting! However, if you’re using Hootsuite (or any other third party app) to schedule your Facebook posts, you should stop.
Yeah–it’s easy–you can write one update and push it to all your social media at once–BUT if you use Hootsuite to schedule your Facebook posts, Facebook will penalize you.
I learned this the hard way: I had to attend a conference on Tuesday, and knew I’d be away from my computer all day. I had written a blog post, and normally, if I’m leaving the house early, I’ll go into Facebook and schedule it to post later in the day. Tuesday I was lazy or in a hurry, so I used Hootsuite to schedule the post to up on my Facebook page.
When I got home that night and checked my post views, I was shocked! I had gotten less than 100!
Now, for me, a post averages between 250 and 600ish views. Less than 100 was not good!
I was curious as to why this was, so I started to do some research, and sure enough, it turns out that Facebook will penalize you by burying your post if you post it via a third-party app.
Check out these articles:
Facebook Content Published Via Third-Party Tools Suffers 67% Fewer Likes
What’s Causing the Reduction in Facebook Reach?
UPDATE: so much has changed with Facebook! I don’t think the method by which you post to Facebook is as important any more as what you are posting, and when, but I’m conducting some experiments and testing some ideas and will post on them when I have some solid numbers.