By a long, long margin, the #1 searched post on this site is Should You Use Hootsuite to Post to Your Facebook Page. It gets tons of searches and I get lots of traffic from that post.
The gist of it is this: Facebook doesn’t like you using a third-party software to post to it. So, while I love scheduling tools like Hootsuite and use it all the time for Twitter, it’s not advised to use it to post to Facebook. I know this because I did some data-drive research where I used Hootsuite to post for a week to my Facebook page, then I compared the reach of those posts to similar posts I’d scheduled through Facebook’s scheduling tool.
The results showed overwhelmingly that posts that are scheduled from Hootsuite have a lower reach. I think that Facebook has some kind of detection in its algorithm that notes when you use a third-party app like Hootsuite to schedule posts. And they don’t like it. So those kinds of posts get a much lower reach.
Recently, someone asked me if the same was true for Buffer. I assumed it would be, as my guess is Facebook has created this rule for all third party apps. So I set out to find out should you use Buffer to post to Facebook?
I scheduled a week’s worth of posts (9 in total) to my Facebook page, then I compared the reach of those posts to the reach of the 9 previous posts I’d scheduled through the FB scheduling tool. Here is what I discovered.
| Date | Buffer | Date | |
| 16/02/2016 | 20 | 09/02/2016 | 71 |
| 16/02/2016 | 22 | 09/02/2016 | 244 |
| 17/02/2016 | 96 | 10/02/2016 | 161 |
| 18/02/2016 | 59 | 11/02/2016 | 120 |
| 18/02/2016 | 93 | 12/02/2016 | 139 |
| 19/02/2016 | 53 | 13/02/2016 | 55 |
| 20/02/2016 | 53 | 14/02/2016 | 114 |
| 21/02/2016 | 134 | 14/02/2016 | 646 |
| 22/02/2016 | 6 | 15/02/2016 | 230 |
| Total reach | 536 | Total reach | 1780 |
| Average post reach | 60 | Average post reach | 198 |
Using the Facebook scheduler over Buffer resulted in more than 200% increase in reach.
And, because I like you so much, I even made a chart.
The orange represents the organic reach on FB scheduled posts, and the blue represents the organic reach of Buffer-scheduled posts.
So, should you use Buffer to post to Facebook? For me the answer is a clear “no.”
What has been your experience with using third-party apps to post to your Facebook pages?