We’re doing some fact-checking today. Enough with the fake social media news. You’ve probably heard something along these lines over the past few months: using 3rd-party tools to share your content on social media hurts your organic reach.
Let’s be honest, it makes sense that social media platforms would limit the organic reach of posts shared by 3rd-party apps. They’d obviously rather have you on their platforms sharing things natively.
Sooo…do those 3rd-party tools hurt? Buffer decided to do a serious study to find out. After all, if 3rd-party apps were being handicapped by The Big Three, Buffer would probably wanna know about it.
And because Buffer is Buffer, they went all in and used three different 3rd-party social media tools for their experiment. The three they used were: Buffer, Hootsuite, and CoSchedule.
So what was their final answer?
No, The Big Three don’t limit the organic reach of content shared from 3rd-party social media tools. ::Phew, wipes sweat off brow::
Here’s the actual data broken down by platform:
Facebook:
- 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 81,639 total reach / 8,515 per post
- Native Posting: 9 posts / 79,380 total reach / 8,820 per post
- Advantage: 3rd-Party
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
- Advantage: Native
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
- Advantage: 3rd-Party
The other important data point that they uncovered in all of this was that video performs so much better on Facebook and Twitter than any other type of post. We’ve heard that said a billion times, but it’s nice to see actual data behind that.
Moral of the story? Keep using those 3rd-party tools for posting on social media if it makes your life easier.
