Most businesses can hardly do without social media because it is a key marketing tool for promotion.
Businesses also tend to use multiple social media channels to promote their products and services, but posting on all of them manually takes a lot of time and effort. This is why they prefer using third party marketing tools.
However, a few marketers are skeptical about using such tools, believing they can negatively impact the engagement on your page. Read this blog to find out if that’s true.
What do third party social media posting tools do?
Before we dive further into finding whether using third party social media tools hurt your engagement, let’s look at what they actually do and how they can benefit your business.
Third party social media posting tools:
- Create a variety of engaging and personalized posts for your social media.
- Schedule posts to publish at the best time for your social pages.
- Publish posts to your multiple social media accounts at once.
- Manage your social media content.
- Compile the responses on your posts from your followers and social media users in one place.
- Analyze the performance of your posts and social media content.
- Suggest ways to improve your social media content strategy.
A few benefits of using a third party social media posting tool:
- Eases your workload by saving you time, effort, and resources.
- Improves your social media presence across different platforms.
- Leverages your audience engagement.
- Boosts your brand awareness.
- Builds better relationships with your followers and social media users.
- Helps your brand become one of the industry leaders.
Social media tools are meant to help businesses in marketing their products and services to a wider audience in a more effective manner. They open a door of opportunities for brands to expand their business impressively. One of the major advantages of using a social media marketing tool is that it helps build and maintain your brand’s online reputation.
Do third party social media tools hurt your engagement?
This is what data-backed studies show.
There are some speculations about social media channels like Facebook, that they have started punishing those using any third party social media posting tools.
Those who prefer manual posting over automated posting by a social media tool argue that the latter ruins your reach and engagement.
However, two specific studies show things in a completely different light.
Research 1 – Sendible’s research focused primarily on Facebook posts. They analyzed 58 different Facebook pages and 5,000 different posts from various industries to produce real results.
They considered the following data points.
- Whether the post was added by Facebook itself or through a third party tool.
- The total number of engagements the Facebook post received.
- The total number of users on Facebook that saw the post on their feed.
- Whether it was a link, a video, or a photo.
Key findings from the research:
- Overall, the posts that were published using third party tools received 10.3% higher engagement as compared to those posted manually.
- Posts with links published using third party tools got 52.9% higher engagement compared to those posted manually.
- Posts with images published using third party tools received 32.2% less engagement than manually posted images.
- Cross-posting (images and videos) on Facebook via Instagram received 5-10% less engagement.
- Videos posted using third party tools received almost 20% less engagement.
To sum it up, the research shows that third party tools do not negatively influence your social media engagement as a whole.
Research 2 – Buffer’s research revolved around an experiment that was conducted for a month. The team and a few marketers tested 35 different profiles and 200 of their posts.
They considered the following data points:
- Quite a few third party social media tools and accounts were tested.
- Similar content quality was tested across diverse social media platforms.
- Posting time and frequency were also taken into account.
Key findings from the research:
Posting with 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
Posting with third party tools – 45 posts | 949,890 total reach | 21,108 per post
Native posting – 45 posts | 975,223 total reach | 21,671 per post
Posting with 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
Two key points to highlight from this study are that the quality of your content determines the success of your posts, and video content does much better than posts with links or photos.
Both studies indicate that third party tools have no negative impact on the reach and engagement of your social media.
Now that we know third party social media tools are not to be blamed for low engagement, there are a few other probable reasons behind it.
- Posting too frequently can do more harm. Your audience may get used to seeing your posts all the time and may not engage with them.
- Publishing unoriginal and copied content cannot grow your social media.
- Not interacting frequently with your followers or audience can leave them feeling insignificant to your brand.
- Spamming your followers can end up pushing social networks like Facebook to reduce the reach of your posts.
- Posting at suboptimal times and using hashtags excessively in each post can be detrimental to your social media growth.
Final words
After taking everything into account, it is safe to say that using third party social media posting tools does not hamper your engagement. Sometimes it is important to look at the bigger picture instead of blaming marketing tools for the poor performance of your social media.
What is really important about social media marketing is that you need to invest time in it and interact with your audience. You need to show your followers that you recognize their efforts and are grateful to them for engaging with the content you share on social media.
Using a third party social media marketing and management tool like Practina ensures that your brand gets the best response from your audience by creating and publishing highly engaging posts. It automatically takes care of most of your social media marketing tasks even while you are away from work.
Furthermore, Practina can help you run ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Google, connecting you instantly with prospective leads for your business.
Create your free account with Practina today to explore all of its capabilities.
