Industry - Your Facebook Page Could Take a Hit!

Interesting discovery by the gang at hubspot.com -- The new timeline feature on Facebook punishes brands that use third-party software tools.

They claim that as soon as Facebook rolled out Timeline to brand pages, their overall engagement -- meaning likes, shares, and comments -- decreased significantly. They also discovered that engagement immediately went back to normal after posting something manually to Facebook.

So what's the deal here? It seems pretty simple: If you use Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or any other third-party software to time-shift your posts, you're going to be punished by Facebook. Facebook's obvious goal is to get you interacting directly with their platform, so manual posts are given more "weight" than posts sent in from outside apps.

So what now? Now you experiment. If your station updates Facebook using third-party apps, check your engagement since going to Timeline. Then, if you do use a third-party app, try posting half the time manually, and half the time using the third-party app. Have your "likes" and "comments" taken a hit, or are they the same?
If you HAVE taken a hit while using third-party tools, start posting manually. Save your time-shift tools for Twitter.

Any thoughts?

-Dave