This story originally appeared on Buffer
Putting your trust as a marketer or brand in third-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 third-party tools?
- Are third-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 third-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 third-party social media tools stack up against native posting.
We’re excited to share the experiment setup and results in their entirety.
Brief summary of results: third-party tools do not 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:
- Third-party tools: 9 posts / 81,639 total reach / 9,071 per post
- Native posting: 9 posts / 79,380 total reach / 8,820 per post
Twitter:
- Third-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:
- Third-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.
Third-party social media tools vs. native posting: the 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 third-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 third-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.
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 6:00 a.m. & 12:00 p.m….
