Facebook, Agorapulse and the Algorithm

As someone who makes her living (partially) from running social media feeds, I am a fan of any tool that makes that job easier.

I use a variety of different apps and tools to generate  and schedule content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram (I’ve given up on Google + finally).

I have long been a fan of Hootsuite, and use it daily to schedule tweets and to plan out my Instagram posts for the week.

A long time ago, though, I gave up using it to post to Facebook, and that’s because of Facebook’s algorithm.

I ran a series of experiments, using Hootsuite, and then, later, Buffer, to test my theory that using a third party app would make a difference in the reach of your posts. I felt like while I used a third party app like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule my Facebook posts, my reach was less, so I decided to test that theory.

You can read those posts here and here, but I’ll give you the reader’s digest condensed version. In both of my experiments, using a third-party app to post to Facebook meant less reach than using the Facebook scheduling tool.

I recently started using a new social media tool called Agorapulse that I like lots, because it does different things than Hootsuite, like queuing the same tweet over and over again multiple times. And yes, I have been using it for a few weeks to schedule posts to my Facebook page and to my LinkedIn.

So I was curious: had FB’s algorithm changed since the last time I did this experiment? Or would Agorapulse for whatever reason be immune?

I did two weeks of posts: one scheduled through Agorapulse, and one scheduled through the FB publisher.

I looked at two main stats:

• The organic reach of the posts
• The number of engaged users

I compared 13 posts that were scheduled through Facebook and 13 scheduled through Agorapulse.

Here’s the raw data:

So, yes, again it looks as if using a third party app does indeed impact your reach on Facebook.

However! Someone even nerdier than I did a similar experience, and you can read about how that turned out here.

What are your thoughts? Do you find your Facebook posts get less reach when you use a third-party app? Let me know in the comments below!