Have you been using third-party social media scheduling tools? Did you notice a drop in engagement? Has your audience growth ground to a halt? You’re not alone… using schedulers can screw up your organic reach. 

At The Thinking Cap, we believe the negative impact of using social media scheduling tools far outweighs any positives. Let’s explain why in more detail and tell you how you can fix it.

Why social media scheduling tools are popular 

It’s no secret that social media scheduling tools are seen as more convenient than posting every day. 

There are many popular tools out there, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, CoSchedule, Planable, and Taplio. Used by many marketing teams and business owners alike, they’re sold with the premise of making your social media marketing easier. 

When you batch create social media content and work to a social media calendar, having everything scheduled can be a weight off your shoulders. 

The dark side of scheduling tools 

In theory, social media scheduling tools save you time and make your marketing more efficient. But what people don’t often realise is the negative impact using schedulers can have on your results. 

Third-party schedulers – 

• Don’t offer the full posting options
• Remove the human touch 
• Reduce social interaction 

Limited content types through social media scheduling tools

Most third-party tools don’t offer the full range of content types. For example, LinkedIn does not currently support PDF uploads in scheduling tools. They also don’t allow you to post polls.

This could be having a big impact on the results of your content, as you’re not able to take advantage of the popular carousel post feature or ask your audience a question through a poll. 

You also cannot post Instagram stories through a social media scheduling tool. Stories are a great way to show behind-the-scenes content and build a personal relationship with your followers. 

Most tools also don’t allow you to tag others in posts, which is another a missed opportunity to increase your exposure.

Less engagement on your social media posts 

Have you heard of the term ‘post and ghost’ on social media? It’s when someone shares a post but does not spend any time on the platform interacting with others. Every time you schedule a post using a third-party tool, the platform thinks you’re posting and ghosting. 

Platforms like LinkedIn penalise users who don’t engage and interact with other connections. To be seen, you need to spend time on the platform commenting on other posts and sending messages to people. 

Using a social media scheduling tool means you’ll be losing out on the human interaction before and after your post goes out. That not only makes you less visible in your connections’ news feeds, but it will reduce the amount of people LinkedIn shows your content to. 

Humans crave personal interaction. It’s no different online as it is in-person. The law of reciprocity is a strong influential bias that affects most people, without them even realising. People naturally think if you do something nice for me, I’ll do something back. 

That means when you comment and like other people’s social media posts, they’re much more likely to support you and your business. People give back when they’ve had interaction and support. 

Social media is all about building the know, like, and trust factors. You can’t do that without starting conversations with potential prospects and showing up regularly. 

Using social media scheduling tools removes the human element of your profiles and makes it feel like shouting into a void.