Buffer might seem like a biased scientist when it comes to an experiment like this, but their well-executed study shows they were no joke when finding the capital t Truth. They answer questions we ourselves ask every day. Chances are if you use 3rd-party social media tools like Buffer, CoSchedule, or Hootsuite, you’ve asked these questions too.

Are my posts getting optimal reach and engagement? Do social media platforms penalize 3rd-party tools? Are 3rd-party tools really worth the cost?

So, for an entire month, Buffer tested more than 200 posts across 35 profiles to see exactly how 3rd-party social media tools stack up vs. native posting on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Show notes below:

• (01:50) The 3 factors used in the experiment: account variation (multiple 3rd party tools and platforms), content quality, and posting consistency
• (02:25) How they used 11 different brands and marketers, creating for wide-breadth of variation 
• (03:40) Rest easy… The experiment did not find a significant difference in reach their engagement  
• (04:25) You can find the full study on buffer’s blog with a downloadable spreadsheet if you want to run your own experiment
• (04:45) Comparing numbers of tools vs. native performance with regards to reach and impressions
  • (05:00) 3rd-party posting won on Facebook with a total reach 81,600 vs. 79,400 with native
  • (05:15) Native posts did slightly better on Twitter reaching 975,000 vs. 950,000
  • (05:25) 3rd-party posting beat out native posts on LinkedIn with 63,000 vs. 54,600
• (05:40) What does this all mean? That there’s not a huge difference concerning native vs. posts using 3-party tools. Win! 
• (07:10) #1 takeaway? Content is the most important factor
• (08:10) What else did their study uncover? That video content outperformed link content and image and gifs content by more than 72% 
• (09:30) Planning and uploading natively to social is a huge challenge, so utilize those social media tools! It’s how you’re able to ship great content consistently and on time

If there’s one thing all marketers have to be good at, it’s experimenting and being open to trying new things. The best part about experimenting is that it usually gives you a chance to do something before your competitors. If your company was an early adopter of Twitter, Instagram, etc., you know how valuable that can be.

On the flip side, if you were an early adopter of Google Buzz (Google, what?), you probably just wasted your time. It’s a risk, but always worth trying.

So what’s worth testing out right now? Here are a few ideas from Hootsuite:

1. Add royalty-free music to your Facebook videos. Okay, this is a pretty tame experiment. By using Sound Collection, you can add the right soundtrack to your videos without having to worry about copyright’s or blowing your budget.
2. Showcase your best content using Stories Highlights. This feature lets you save your very best Stories content, and repost it permanently to your page. That should help win the argument against disappearing content.
3. Be more transparent. Instagram launched a paid partnership tag that you can use with influencers. When an influencer uses this tag, the sponsor has access to performance data for that post.
4. Broadcast live with a guest. You can now do split-screen live broadcasts. You can use this to do collaborative broadcasts with whoever you want—clients, partners, brands, etc.
5. Easily create branded Snapchat lenses. From the company who invented the augmented reality lens, Snapchat is now letting brands create their own lenses.
6. Automate promoted tweets. Twitter is making their ad platform even easier by allowing brands to pay $99/month for automated ads. Twitter will automatically put your best content in front of new audiences based on their algorithm.
7. Educate your audience using LinkedIn video. Video is already available to LinkedIn Users, and it’s coming to brands soon. Like all other social platforms, LinkedIn is going to be optimizing their algorithm around video.

Plenty of other new features to experiment with…

You wouldn’t expect a car company to run a commercial about why you shouldn’t buy a car, but it’s 2018. Seems like all the conventional rules about selling are being tossed out the car window.

So here we are with an ad from Volvo, which uses a haunting cover of “My Favorite Things” to not sell their cars. We’re not kidding about this. Volvo created a haunting spot to not sell their cars. Don’t believe us, just read the closing line of the ad: “By not owning things, you are not owned by things.”

Weird, but the real reason they’re running this ad is that they want people to opt-in to their new Care by Volvo program. It’s kinda like Spotify, but for cars. Instead of buying a car, you pay a monthly fee and get a brand new Volvo to use. Plus, you get a new car every 24 months.

Definitely one of the weirder approaches to selling cars that we’ve seen.