Use of a Feed aggregator (Networked Blogs, RSS Graffiti, Youtube self Posting, Twitter, etc) for Facebook Posting is keeping your Posts from being seen!
LOOK what is happening! Facebook is posting the BEST status updates (by their Edge Rank) or the first Networked Blogs post and then grouping the rest together. They have been doing this for awhile but now it’s really happening in a huge way. They are not just grouping all of one pages statuses together now Facebook is grouping ALL Feed aggregator blogs posts that I get in a given time period together.
What’s the impact when you use feed aggregator posting like Networked Blogs, RSS Graffiti, etc?
Your posts are NOT being seen by your intended audience and if advertisers are paying you to post, they aren’t getting their bang for their buck either. Mari Smith, everyone’s Facebook Guru,recommends against using a feed aggregator on a regular basis:
Just be careful of overly using third party apps to post all your content on your Page wall. Manual posts get the best EdgeRank (News Feed optimization).
(And then she further commented on her Facebook on April 25, 2011):
Did you know? Your content posted via third party apps may be hidden (collapsed) in the News Feed of your fans!! e.g. It’s best not to automatically publish your Networked Blog posts to your wall – your fans may not see the content in their News Feed. I definitely recommend you use the app for great SEO, but turn off the wall posting feature and manually share your new blog posts directly on your wall for better visibility and engagement. (Aside from the collapsed posts in the News Feed of your fans, third party app posts get slightly lower EdgeRank scores anyway… unfortunately!)
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and now you can see why! Your page’s Facebook wall feed may not show that your posts are being being mushed in with all the other Networked blog feeds, or twitter feeds…so you may think that using your particular feed aggregator is no problem. It isn’t. See the example above and below.
What about Hoot Suite, a very popular tweet and post scheduler? I have not observed the stacking of Hoot Suite posts but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the same. Can anyone else confirm from their newsfeed?
Should you be using a Facebook Aggregator for posting your blog posts to Facebook?
Update April 2011:
Here’s an interesting quote dated April 11, 2011 from What’s Next Marketing, Check it out:
Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and other self-publishers use the 3rd Party API to provide their members the ability to post to Facebook Pages without going onto the site itself. Those services have even added the ability to schedule content to be auto-published at a later set time.
While very convenient for users, Facebook sees little reason to give this scheduled content a high EdgeRank weight. And why should they? Users aren’t going to the Facebook website, engaging with the infrastructure, or viewing Facebook Advertising. According to our recent research, manually posting content on Facebook, rather than via a 3rd Party API publisher like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, can increase its viewership as much as 300%!
UPDATE Feb, 2011:
Here’s some more information from MaAnna, owner of Blogaid, who wrote the an article on 3rd party APIs (feed Aggregators) called Google and Facebook changed and so must I.
Two of my fave folks to follow on Facebook are Denise Wakeman and Mari Smith. Recently, both have made several posts on the negative impact of using third party apps to auto-populate your Facebook business page with blog posts from your main site. The app-populated posts weren’t showing up in the fan’s News Feed consistently, and the ranking was devalued by Facebook….After making the changes, within two weeks my Facebook stats nearly tripled quadrupled and they continue to keep going up.
Update: Feb. 2011
Denise Wakeman, from the Blog Squad weighed in with this additional information:
Here’s the link to my post in which I share why I’m giving up on automation to my Facebook page:
http://www.buildabetterblog.com/2011/02/im-giving-up-on-automation.html
Please note that I continue to use Social RSS to auto post to my Page, but NOT to my wall. If someone wants to see my latest blog posts they can click on the link in the left sidebar to see recent content.
The Chief Blonde recommends against it heavily, based on what she has observed on Facebook today!
UPDATE: May 2011
You can also increase your views on your Facebook Posts by 650% by stopping this practice of utilizing a feed aggregator. See this great article on NOT autoposting via third party APIs.
UPDATE 9/2011:
A Recent Mashable Article Reports that a study by Applum, creators of the Facebook Edgerank Checker, studied a million+ Facebook updates on over 50,000 Facebook Pages to test the hypothesis that posting to via Facebook third-party feed Aggregators won’t create the same interaction as posting manually to Facebook. Applum determined that utilizing ANY of the top ten feed aggregators resulted in 88% fewer comments and likes, when contrasted with manually posting to Facebook. WHY? It’s suspected that Facebook punishes feed aggregators in the complex Edgerank alogorithm . Often, Facebook updates from feed aggregators are smushed into ONE SINGLE FEED story. Although a couple of my blogger friends who use the feed aggregators have recently noticed that in their feed, Facebook has stopped this practice of collapsing all the feed into one.
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What I do when I have Problems Posting links in Facebook
