Using 3rd Party Tools with Facebook – An Emerging Problem

August 12, 2011 • 3:59 pm

Using 3rd Party Tools with Facebook – An Emerging Problem

If you do much posting on social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, chances are you use—or should probably be using—a third party tool to help you with that posting and with managing and monitoring your identity(s) across these networks.

Third party tools such as TweetDeck, HootSuite, Social Ooomph and others interface (through their APIs) with your accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc. and provide various tools to facilitate your work on those systems. You can track multiple accounts on Twitter alongside your Facebook and LinkedIn feeds, schedule posts, upload posts in bulk from your computer for future work, work collaboratively with your colleagues on the same account, post simultaneously to multiple systems/platforms (eg, send a post to both Twitter and Facebook), and so on.

In a subsequent post, I’ll talk in detail about how I and my clients use some of these tools for particular tasks and social media needs. But right now, in case you are already using them, I wanted to alert you to an apparent problem with these tools and how they interact with Facebook.

Actually, there seem to be two problems.

(1) Reportedly, when multiple posts appear consecutively from the same third party tool, they may be aggregated together in people’s Facebook feed, even when they are from different people/posters—in other words, your posts might be collapsed under those of someone else using the same third party tool. And there’s a good chance that then your posts won’t be seen, that the collapsed entries won’t be opened/expanded. (It’s easy to tell something was posted by a third party app—it will say “via whatever” after the posting time.)

(2) Facebook uses a system (algorithm) they call EdgeRank to determine which posts appear in the “Top News” feed. Reportedly, using third party tools (HootSuite, TweetDeck, yada yada) to post reduces your “score” in EdgeRank and therefore the likelihood of your posts appearing in your followers’ (maybe customers’) “Top News.”

For anyone using, or hoping to use, Facebook for marketing and outreach purposes, these are serious problems that might greatly diminish the penetration of your social media messages.

However, I haven’t been able to fully verify these problems. The problem with EdgeRank is very difficult to check up on, obviously. As to the problem with the aggregating of consecutive posts by different people using the same third party tool, I have seen pictures of it occurring, but also seen feeds where it doesn’t seem to be happening.

Still, until these issues are fully clarified, the moral seems clear: if Facebook posts are central to getting your message out, you would be well-advised to post directly on Facebook rather than through third party tools.

For more…