7 Sep 2011
Study: Auto-Posting to Facebook Decreases Likes and Comments by 70%
I just came across this Applum/EdgeRank Checker study which reports an astonishing 70% less Likes and comments on brand pages that are using third party platforms for posting their Facebook updates. Why? Applum says Facebook Penalizes 3rd Party API’s EdgeRank and Collapses 3rd Party API Updates. Apparently it’s been a general consensus in the EdgeRank community that 3rd party APIs like HootSuite and TweetDeck are punished in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.
“We ran our analysis on 1,000,000+ Updates on 50,000+ Pages that influence over 1,000,000,000+ Fans. We took each individual post and analyzed the engagement (comment & likes) along with how many fans the Page had at the moment of updating. The result is a percentage that represents engagement per fan per post. Our sample size ranged per API, although we cut it off at the Top 10 APIs outside of Facebook.”
The study determined that compared to the engagement of posts published manually to Facebook’s web or mobile interfaces, the reduction in engagement ratios of the top third-party publishing APIs are shown in the image below.
The Facebook ‘punishment’ of third party APIs was news to me, but I’m now learning of other similar reports like PageLever’s study which indicated that Facebook Pages with more fans receive fewer unique Page views per fan.
For more on the Applum study, click here.
