Automated social media platforms have become a popular technique in the hotel industry to manage social media campaigns. The ability to schedule posts in advance is attractive to the hotelier who does not have the time to sit in front of their computer all day looking at Facebook. However, a recent study by Applum found that utilizing these tools actually reduces engagement by more than 80% when compared to manual posts on Facebook.
Applum studied more than 1M Facebook posts across more than 50k Facebook pages. They looked at how fans engage with posts (likes, comments, etc). Across the board, the interaction with automated posts was significantly less than the interaction with manual posts to Facebook. The authors cite several possible reasons:
Facebook Penalizes 3rd Party API’s EdgeRank
When an object is created in Facebook, it is assigned a weight. We believe that Facebook strategically reduced the weight of objects created through the API. The reason behind this strategy would be to encourage more content creation within the Facebook Platform. This ultimately increases the value of their platform while increasing ad impressions.Facebook Collapses 3rd Party API Updates
When the same 3rd Party Platform has multiple updates within your feed (regardless of the Page or People who created the object), Facebook will collapse the objects and only display a single object. This can potentially kill visibility for objects involved.
Content is not Optimized for Facebook
One of the conveniences of a 3rd Party Platform is that you can simultaneously update Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your blog, and hopefully not MySpace. Unfortunately, this typically requires the social marketer to optimize their content for all the social networks at once. Twitter has character limitations at 140, Facebook allows for many more characters. Some networks allow photos to be attached, while other networks do not. This distracts the social marketer from specifically optimizing their update for Facebook.
What should a hotelier do? Use these automated tools sparingly. There is still a place for these tools; automation is effective for vacations and off hour postings. However, they should not be the primary method you post your content to Facebook.
Hotelier’s should also really consider their content strategy on Facebook. How creative are you being? Are you really engaging your fans? Are you utilizing all of the tools that Facebook makes available? Video? Polls? Photos?
Automation allows you to exist in a comfortable box of simple, regular content updates. To really develop an effective campaign break out and be creative.
Read the full article at:
http://edgerankchecker.com/blog/2011/09/does-using-a-third-party-api-decrease-your-engagement-per-post/
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I’m actually intrigued by what you shared here on how Facebook’s EdgeRank penalizes 3rd party API. I think that social media automation tools are great, if you use it responsibly. Like, you may automate the non-productive task of sharing news so you save more time to engage with your peers instead. I guess, there’s no such thing as an all-in-one fix and with Facebook, asking your subscribers/fans questions can help increase engagement. In the end, I’ll have to stick with my own version of Pareto’s 80/20 rule for my social media marketing mix: as in 80% conversation and 20% automation. How about you?