Manually Post to Facebook or Lose Impressions
October 22, 2011 Leave a Comment
Since the big update to Facebook in mid-September, I’ve noticed a decrease in impressions when using any kind of third-party app to post updates to Fan pages. It seems using third-party applications like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to post updates to your Facebook Fan pages could mean less of your Fans will view the post. This also seems to be a problem with some Facebook applications that post RSS feeds automatically to a Fan page.
For example, I use the Facebook app RSS Graffiti to automatically send to new blog posts to a Fan page.
These blog posts used to generate 4000-5000 impressions per post.
They now average 800-1000.
I also recently needed to send out a few scheduled updates to Facebook using HootSuite and experienced similar results:
A similar post I had sent out manually the previous day had better results:
From this article it appears Facebook is aware of the issue: http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/facebook-penalizes-third-party-apps/
The fact that this is still an issue over a month later is surprising. But until it’s resolved, I’d recommend posting your updates to Facebook Fan pages manually when possible.
