Putting your trust as a marketer or brand in 3rd-party social media tools to manage all of your posts can be a bit scary.
You might be wondering:
- Are my posts getting optimal reach and engagement?
- Do social media platforms penalize 3rd-party tools?
- Are 3rd-party tools really worth the cost?
These are some of the most common questions our Customer Advocates receive on a daily basis. And up until this research, we haven’t had any concrete data to say “yes” or “no” to whether or not 3rd-party tools affect the reach and engagement of posts.
We’re hoping to change that.
For an entire month, with the help of several awesome marketers and brands, we tested more than 200 posts across 35 profiles to see exactly how 3rd-party social media tools stack up vs. native posting.
Today we’re excited to share the experiment setup and results in their entirety!
Brief summary of results: 3rd-party tools don’t seem to negatively affect the reach of posts
We’d love to share a quick summary of what we found (you can find the full results and more on how we ran the experiment below!).
Facebook:
- 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 81,639 total reach / 9,071 per post
- Native Posting: 9 posts / 79,380 total reach / 8,820 per post
- 3rd-Party Tools: 45 posts / 949,890 total impressions / 21,108 per post
- Native Posting: 45 posts / 975,223 total impressions / 21,671 per post
LinkedIn:
- 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 63,221 total reach / 7,024 per post
- Native Posting: 9 posts / 54,646 total reach / 6,071 per post
Read on to check out all of the details!
3rd-party social media tools vs. native posting (setup)
In order to make the research as statistically sound as possible, we focused on three important factors:
- Account Variation: Ensuring that we tested multiple 3rd-party social media tools and social accounts
- Content Quality: Ensuring that we tested similar content across platforms
- Posting Consistency: Ensuring that we posted at similar times and frequencies
Our tests ran from November 27, 2017, to December 19, 2017.
Account Variation
Our biggest concern with an experiment like this is that our results would be biased if we only tested Buffer content with the Buffer tool.
We knew it would take multiple marketers and tools to make the data meaningful.
First, we signed up for test accounts with Hootsuite and CoSchedule. This would allow us to test three different 3rd-party social media tools to reduce the chance of a particular tool playing a factor in reach and engagement.
Then, we turned to the Social Media Masterminds Facebook Group and asked if any marketers would be up for helping us run a few tests. The response was incredible…
Judging by the number of comments and overall enthusiasm for this experiment, we knew we were onto something.
In the end, we received data from 11 different brands, totaling more than 98 posts across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Factoring in these results to the overall findings greatly helped to reduce any biased data. A huge thanks to everyone that participated!
Now we just had to figure out how we would approach content.
Content Quality
Content presented a unique challenge in that we had to be strategic about what we posted and when we posted it.
As many marketers know, posting the same content multiple times in a short period of time might result in a decrease of reach and engagement with each post.
We ultimately decided that we would not post the same content multiple times. Rather, we would post three different types of content (links, images, videos) and do our very best to ensure that each piece of content was super high-quality.
But what we realized is that, at the end of the day, it’s nearly impossible to create truly equal content – some posts will inevitably perform better than others based on a hundreds of different algorithm factors.
In short, content is the number one factor that determines success on social media.
More on the implications of social media content later in this post!
Posting Consistency
The final factor that we focused on for this experiment was to ensure that we were posting consistently. Both timing and frequency impact social media results and so we did our best to post at roughly the same time and frequency each day.
- Facebook: Posted once per day between 6:00am & 12:00pm PST.
- Twitter: Posted 3-5 times per day between 5:00am & 10:00pm PST.
- LinkedIn: Posted once per day between 6:00am & 12:00pm PST.
Posting natively proved to be the most difficult part of this experiment! We found that without 3rd-party social media tools we were having to set reminders in our calendar in order to post at the correct times.
Multiplying that by eight posts per day and three social media accounts, we did end up missing a few posts here and there which prolonged the study.
Last, but not least. It might be helpful to provide the Buffer audience sizes on each network.
Current Buffer Audience Sizes:
- Facebook: 106,000
- Twitter: 927,000
- LinkedIn: 16,500
3rd-party social media tools vs. native posting (results)
Now for the fun part!
Do 3rd-part tools negatively affect reach and engagement on social media?
Data-Backed Answer: No.
We did not find a significant difference in social media reach and engagement whether we posted through 3rd-party tools or natively to each network. As you might expect, some pieces of content performed better than others no matter how they were posted.
If you’re interested…
