If I Use a Third-Party Social Scheduler, Will it Affect My Reach?

How do you get the most bang for your buck on social media?

That is, should you spend your time scheduling posts to be shared at a specific time? Or does posting natively on each social network get more engagement?

Social media gets more crowded with every passing minute. What’s more, just when you think you’ve got a platform figured out, the algorithm changes. This has left most social media users wondering what is the best way forward. Some have heard that scheduled posts don’t perform as well as those written directly on each social channel (also known as native posting). Plus, there’s uncertainty about how Facebook’s algorithm changes affect how posts are displayed.

Unfortunately, these claims are all anecdotal. There are several reasons why social scheduling beats native posting: image previews, link tracking, and advanced analytics are just a few. In the end, with social scheduling, you’ll save heaps of time, which is everyone’s most valuable resource. Give scheduling a try—we dare you!

Your Questions, Answered

Will I get less engagement with scheduling than native posts?

We, along with research by many other tools, have found no evidence to date that scheduled posts see less engagement (if you have any, please send it to us)! Even if you do notice any differences it can be hard to pinpoint the culprit. Your timing, your audience, and your content all affect your levels of engagement, so don’t lay the blame on your scheduling service right away. If you have a lot of content, it may still take too much time and effort to post everything natively. On average, users save 5 hours per week when using a scheduling tool.

I’ve heard that post recycling doesn’t work.

This is also a myth. Post recycling does work and can give up to 10x more engagement, but not every post should be recycled. Recycling works by sharing your content with more of your audience. The more you send out a post, the more chance that the right people see it at the right time, and it goes viral. You never know when this will happen—it could be on the 5th, 10th or 100th cycle that your post goes viral. In general, the more recycling you do, the higher your engagement boost will be.

I want to focus on quality over quantity.

If you’re posting regularly, there are still advantages to using a scheduling platform like SmarterQueue. You’ll be able to make sure the post looks good, track clicks, and monitor engagement with advanced analytics. Regardless, SmarterQueue allows you to prioritise whatever matters to you. Perhaps you think you don’t need a social scheduler if you’re focusing on engaging posts rather than frequent posts. In this case, you can look to the content curation tool together with advanced analytics to see what types of content perform best. Social media is not always about quantity, automation or recycling—it depends on what your audience wants to see.

7 Reasons Scheduling Beats Posting Natively

Twitter Cards

When scheduling your tweets, SmarterQueue lets you see how they will look before posting. This helps you use your 280 characters to write your own comment, and let the title/description in the card highlight what you’re sharing. Then, if the card doesn’t look engaging, you can add your own photo that captures your content best.

Twitter card preview
Twitter card preview

Facebook Previews

A social scheduling tool also provides accurate Facebook previews so you can see in advance how your post will look. This way, you don’t accidentally post something that looks bad and gets low engagement as a result. Whether you need to publish blog posts or to promote an event on Facebook, correct previews are essential. 

Facebook preview
Accurate Facebook previews prevent badly cropped images

Custom Text

You’ll get poor engagement if you share the same text on all platforms since each site has different requirements. With tools that post the same text to all platforms; or that automate cross-posting between platforms (like IFTTT or Zapier), you may get much less engagement than if you customised the text for each platform. Plus, without customising your message text, you can’t customise @mentions or #hashtags for each platform. This comes across as unprofessional to your followers.

Customised text in SmarterQueue

Content Curation

SmarterQueue’s content curation tool helps you find the best-performing posts in your niche, that have proven engagement. This way, you can save time finding what to share, and know what works and what doesn’t. This high-quality content will result in more engagement from your followers.

Content curation in SmarterQueue
Content curation

Analytics

Content categories, together with SmarterQueue’s analytics capabilities mean you can see exactly what types of content your audience engages with. You’ll know what to post more of and what to leave behind. You can also see what posting times are the most popular. Without analytics, it’s hard to know why some posts did well and others didn’t.

Link Tracking

You can create automatic (and unique) bit.ly links with custom UTM parameters for any post, or post category. Link tracking capabilities allow you to learn what content works for your audience, and how your social activity converts to website traffic. Read more about link tracking.

Less Hassle!

Save yourself the time and effort of setting up every post separately. With SmarterQueue you can automate posting, and stay in full control of your content. Gone are the days of logging in every few hours to publish a post. Plus, you don’t have to plan what you’re going to post and when—just add your content and set your schedule. SmarterQueue automatically posts your content at the times you specify. What’s not to love about that?

Real Engagement Takes Time

None of the strategies above is an immediate fix for flagging engagement. Truth is, it takes a concerted effort over a long period of time to build an engaged, tuned-in audience, and time is what most people are short of.

These methods are meant to save your time and frustration so you can focus on the more important aspects of your social media strategy. With your scheduling taken care of, you can spend time conversing with influencers, taking part in Twitter chats, and interacting with your followers one-on-one. When you can spend your time actually being social, that’s how social media was meant to be.

Maximise Your Efforts with Social Scheduling

Sure, you could spend your time entering all your posts directly into each social platform, hoping to see higher engagement. Or, you could save 5 valuable hours every week by scheduling your social posts with SmarterQueue and make time to engage with your followers properly.

Social scheduling is unquestionably better than posting natively. Accurate image and link previews, content curation, and analytics are just a few ways that scheduling allows you to get the most from your social media. Advanced scheduling features with SmarterQueue make it the best choice for your social media schedule. It’s the smartest way to do social media. Properly.

Courtney Apps

Courtney Apps is a business owner, MBA, and never met a dessert she didn’t like. She is the owner of Upstream Digital, which specializes in web design, branding, and social media for small business. She lives in North Vancouver, BC.