Does posting with  3rd-part tools negatively affect reach and engagement on social media?

In an interesting study by Buffer, no effect was seen when posting with 3rd party tools

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.

Total Reach

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

Slight Advantage: 3rd-Party Tools

Twitter:

• 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

Slight Advantage: Native Posting

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

Slight Advantage: 3rd-Party Tools

Video Posts:

3rd-party posting social media tools vs. native posting (takeaways)

1. Importance of Content when posting

The number one takeaway that we got out of this experiment is that content is the most important factor that determines social media posting success.

It matters more than timing and frequency. And it matters more than whether or not we posted natively to each network or through a 3rd-party social media tool.

In examining the data, there were times when a piece of content “went viral” when posted natively and there were times when content “went viral” when posted through a 3rd-party tool.

2. Power of Video

Here’s how videos stacked up in terms of reach and engagement on Facebook and Twitter in comparison to links and images/GIFs:

3. Time and Productivity

Folks that work and are successful in the social media industry know that it can take lots of time and effort to create amazing content and grow accounts.

Planning, uploading, and posting to social media natively turned out to be a major challenge for us. We often found ourselves forgetting to upload a Tweet or Facebook post at a certain time.

And quite ironically, when posting natively, we ended up using Buffer to “store” all of our content so that we could quickly copy and paste the image and caption to each social network. We’re not sure what we would have done without that over the course of the three weeks.

For us, utilizing a social media tool like Buffer, Hootsuite, CoSchedule (or any of the other great tools out there) is how we’re able to ship great content consistently and on time.