Many people who work from home use 3rd party APIs to market on Facebook. Now, a recent study from Edgerank Checker shows that posting via these 3rd party APIs is reducing the engagement of users by 80% in average.

The Study’s Details and Results

More than a million updates submitted directly to Facebook or through 3rd party APIs were examined from more than 50,000 pages. The updates were analyzed by their engagement (comments and/or Likes), calculated with the number of fans their pages had.

The updates that were submitted directly to Facebook were compared to updates from 10 different 3rd party APIs. The results were that updates submitted directly to Facebook received 1% engagement (Comments/Likes by fan to a post) while updates through 3rd part APIs received only 0.22% engagement- Lower by 78%!

Theories And Speculations To Explain The Results (By Edgerank Checker):

Penalties on 3rd Party APIs- Facebook’s algorithm reduces the weight of posts and updates from 3rd party APIs to increase revenue, more people post directly through Facebook means more ads exposure.

Automatic Or Scheduled Posts- These kind of posts lack the “human touch” and they look less good in general.

No Facebook Optimization- Many times 3rd party APIs publish simultaneously to few social networks at once, so they not optimized especially for Facebook.

3rd Party Post Collapses- You can see in the example below how many posts are being collapsed into one.