TUTORIAL ARTICLE

Beginner

5 min

Your guide to social media reach

Everything you need to know about social media reach and how to increase it over time.

What you’ll need
Practice in the app

Although reach isn’t talked about as much in comparison to engagement levels or follower counts, it’s still an important metric that should be highlighted in regards to your social media performance, especially if your goals are focused on brand awareness.

Did you know that social media metrics are often closely related and will affect how highly one another scores? While you may have already considered that a high following might lead to higher engagement — seems straight-forward enough — you may not have considered how engagement levels can affect your reach. Higher engagement levels result in a boost from the algorithm that gets your content to other social media users.

Essentially, no social media metric is unimportant, and neglecting to consider one of your metrics could drag your overall social media performance down. Putting more thought into how your social media strategy affects each of your metrics can have incredibly positive results across the board.

Managing your social media channels with an awareness of your reach, and working with active intention to improve it, is exactly the kind of attitude to take when approaching your social media management.

What is social media reach?

Social media reach refers to the number of individual people who see your content. This metric is often confused with impressions, which refers to the number of times your content was seen (i.e. if a single person sees your content more than once, this will count for multiple impressions). Both metrics are useful in determining how far your content has spread across social networks, and may be an indication of how successful your hashtags are, how engaging your content is, how sharable it is, or how the algorithm has been treating it, among other factors.

If you hope to get more followers and increase your engagement rate, a poor reach will prevent your content from being seen. Furthermore, it’s both interesting and useful to consider how your reach scores against other metrics such as engagement. If your social media reach is significantly higher than your engagement levels, this could be an indication that your content might be doing well in the algorithm but might not be resonating with your audience. If so, you know what to work on in order to improve your social media performance.

What is a good social media reach?

You can find out your social media reach by checking the analytics available within your social media networks. When it comes to a good social media reach figure, the higher number, the better. The higher your social media reach is, the more people your content will have been shown to by the algorithm, which increases your chances of getting more engagement, more followers, more leads, and so on. However, if you want to give more context to your reach, it’s useful to view your reach as a percentage of your following.

To do so you’ll need to do the following social media math:

  • (Reach) divided by (number of followers) = x

  • Multiply this figure (x) by 100

This final figure is your percentage and is referred to as your “reach rate.”

While it’s important to understand that your reach is not a number exclusively made up of your followers, it still helps to calculate your reach as a percentage of your following simply to get a clearer picture of how well you’re doing in terms of content views versus your audience size.

How can you know if your reach rate is successful? Well, reach rate is very subjective and varies depending on how big your following is, and which social channels you’re using. According to BazaarVoice, those with a high Instagram following (<510K) should aim to have a reach rate of 12% or more for posts and 2% or more for Stories to be considered successful, while those with a smaller following should aim to have a reach rate of 32% or above and 7% or more for Stories.

Although it may sound surprising, smaller brands will typically see a higher reach rate versus larger accounts. This generally means that those with larger followings find it more challenging to get their content in front of enough eyes to equal the size of their audience.

Reach vs impressions

To recap, reach is the number of individual people who have viewed your content, while impressions are the number of times your content was seen. Impressions is often the higher figure because it accounts for multiple views from the same people.

Reach is often thought to be a more useful figure to focus on as many will prefer to know simply how many individuals have viewed their content, regardless of how many times. Reach as a metric can be very impactful upon your engagement rate. As a result, it can be very useful to compare your reach and engagement levels to try to understand where the weaknesses in your strategy are. Impressions is a less helpful metric in this regard as one person viewing your content multiple times doesn’t necessarily lead to an increase in engagement.

If you’re a business using social media to grow and generate more sales, reach is a more useful metric to take notice of as it’ll give you a better idea for how many potential leads or customers were reached with a single post. It’s always good news if a single post was displayed to a single person multiple times, but this metric may be less interesting to a business that is focusing on reaching the maximum amount of people, and not necessarily on reaching them more than once per post.

How to track social media reach

Social media reach is something that you should regularly check up on alongside other important metrics such as engagement levels and follower growth. If you’re using a social media analytics tool, you might find it easier to keep track of your metrics over time across multiple channels. However, there are also analytics available within all of the key social media networks that make it simple enough to track your performance over time.

When assessing your reach, be sure to look not only at your average reach figure, but also at the results of individual posts and stories. This will show you if a particular type of content is getting better reach than others, and give you a clue as to which content you should create more of. In some social media networks — such as Instagram Insights — it’s also possible to see how much of your reach has come from followers versus non-followers. This is key information to note as it’ll allow you to make some educated assumptions. For example, if your content is appearing to many more non-followers, this could be a sign that your content is doing well in the algorithm, or that it’s getting shared by users with a lot of non-followers.

How to increase your social media reach

We’ve already touched on how improving one metric can bolster another, but for more specific advice, here are seven tips for raising your social media reach.

1

Make your content more discoverable

There are some very simple tweaks you can make to your content to help expand your social media reach. Tagging any brands or other users featured in your content can encourage those mentioned to share and engage with your content, helping to spread your content across the network and push it to their audience’s feeds. Location tagging (where appropriate) can also help to give your content a boost, as well as making use of popular and relevant hashtags to make content more searchable.

2

Make content more sharable

To improve your social media reach, consider how you can make your content more sharable. High quality content is automatically more sharable, however, there’s no shame in giving your audience an extra nudge to engage by actively encouraging them to “tag a friend who can relate” or “share with your work bestie.” While it’s important not to overdo it, and to make sure that your encouragement is relevant to the post itself, the occasional subtle nudge here and there is definitely worth a try.

3

Make content more engaging

Engagement and reach are two metrics that naturally correlate — increase your engagement and your reach will increase as well. To make your content more engaging, we recommend delving into your analytics to discover more about the demographic of your social media audience so you can create more tailored content. It’s also important to maintain variety within your content strategy by testing a range of content themes and formats to see what resonates.

To build more of a relationship with your audience and encourage further engagement, you need to be actively managing your social media accounts and not just posting and ghosting. If somebody leaves a comment on your video, respond! If people are having a conversation in your comments, join in! The goal is to have regular conversations with the very people who want more of your content.

4

Keep an eye on your analytics

When trying to increase your social media reach, a wise first step is to take a look at what has brought you success so far. By checking in on the analytics available within your individual social channels, you can easily pick out your strongest performing content, your weakest performing content, and have a go at spotting any patterns. Understanding which of your content has had a higher reach in the past will give you a great starting place to build upon further. Brainstorm what similar content you can create, or how to re-use old and successful concepts in a newer, fresher way.

5

Get experimental

Just as you would when trying to get higher engagement levels, experimentation is key to expanding your reach. Ensuring your content is varied should allow you to easily make judgements on what your audience is enjoying the most, and what types of content they want to see more of. Remember to experiment not only with content themes, but also the formats you’re using; try Instagram Reels, making Stories, creating polls, or even going Live. It’s vital to stay flexible and be open to trying new features and formats that social media networks are constantly releasing. Not only will the newer content types be favored by the algorithm, but you’ll reduce the chances of being overshadowed by the brands that aren’t afraid to try something new.

6

Be strategic with posting times

Posting when the majority of your audience is online is a no-brainer when it comes to getting more eyes on your content and a greater chance of engagement. If you don’t have time to run your own tests to discover which publishing times work best for you, here’s a quick cheat sheet for the optimum times to post for the top social media networks:

Best time to post on Instagram:

  • Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays: 11am

  • Tuesdays: 2pm

Best time to post on LinkedIn:

  • Tuesdays: 7am - 8:30am, 10am - 12pm, 5pm - 6pm

  • Wednesdays: 7am - 12pm, 5pm - 6pm

  • Thursdays: 7am - 8:30am, 9am, 1pm - 2pm, 5pm - 6pm

  • Fridays: 7am - 8:30am, 12pm

Best time to post on Facebook:

  • Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays: 9am-1pm

Best time to post on Twitter:

  • Wednesdays: 9am –3pm

  • Tuesdays and Thursdays: 9am –11am

7

Collaborate with influencers and brands

Find a brand or social media influencer whose audience aligns with yours and reach out to suggest a collaboration. Be sure to explain what the value of collaborating with you is — whether it’s your expertise in a particular area, your ability to create quality content, or simply exposure to your audience. Working with brands or influencers in the same space can be mutually beneficial in exposing each account to one another’s audiences — which will do wonders for expanding your reach, as well as potentially upping your follower counts.

Remember: social media metrics are great performance indicators but they aren’t the be-all and end-all. As long as you continue to focus on creating great social media content that resonates with your audience, good results will naturally come to you. However, if you do want to put a little more focus into expanding your social media reach, we hope our advice has given you the understanding and skills needed to take things to the next level.


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September 8, 2023

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