All last week I was in Virginia, hanging out on the beach with an amazing group of people. Updates for the Clout Smiths were scheduled regularly using a combination of HootSuite and my website’s built in abilities. I thought I had nabbed a guilt free vacation.
I wasn’t expecting huge traffic for the week of the Fourth of July, but I still managed to write (what I thought to be) good content for every day of the week. I was, however, expecting average traffic. I started Facebook advertising campaign at the beginning of the week so I expected any fall off to be compensated for. Most of the traffic for the site is derived from Facebook and I was using a tested advertisement.
Alas, the freedom from guilt dissipated quickly when I broke my own rules and snuck a peek at my analytics stats. Traffic was roughly halved. While correlation isn’t causation and I’m wary to point my finger at HootSuite, it’s pretty clear to me that posts published by HootSuite are punished by EdgeRank.
This makes sense when considering what little info the Facebook team has released about EdgeRank, posts generated by users have a higher rank that posts generated by applications and Facebook clearly doesn’t differentiate between HootSuite and other apps.
So what’s the best strategy? Unfortunately at the moment it looks like it’s to log on every day and post manually. I’ll still advocate working in large creative bursts, but instead of working in HootSuite, I’ll be working in Google Docs and copy and pasting updates into Facebook. If I come up with a better solution I’ll be sure to let you know. To me, keeping up the EdgeRank on the content I work so hard to create is worth logging in once a day. Not ideal, but not the worst thing in the world.
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