Reach

What is social media reach?

Reach is a metric that measures the number of unique people that saw a piece of media content. As an example, if an Instagram post has a reach of 37,000, then that means that the post was seen by 37,000 unique people. 

Reach provides a way to quantify the number of unique people who had the chance to learn about your brand, engage with your post, or take a specific action.

Why is reach important in social media?

Reach is a valuable top-of-funnel social media metric to include in your marketing reports because it is a key indicator of how many people your social media content is reaching and how many people had the chance to learn about your brand.

It’s also a metric that helps compare the effectiveness of different types of social media posts and campaigns. For example, by comparing the reach between two different social media posts, you can better understand what types of posts resonated more with your audience. Those insights can then be fed back into your social media strategy and can help you improve your engagement over time.

What’s the difference between reach and impressions?

The difference between reach and impressions is that reach measures the amount of unique people that saw a piece of media content, while impressions measures the total amount of times a piece of content was seen. 

Usually, you’ll have more impressions than reach because one single person could view your content multiple times. Impressions would count all the times that content was viewed and reach would just consider the fact that it was seen by one person.

How is social media reach measured?

Social media reach is measured by counting the number of unique people who saw your social media posts. In order to do this, you’ll need to rely on specific tools to count those people for you:

• Social media analytics tool: The best and easiest way to measure reach is to use a social media analytics tool that provides a dashboard to see your post reach across all social networks. For example, within Buffer’s Analytics tool, you can get a broad understanding of your reach across multiple social channels from one intuitive dashboard, and in-depth insights into when’s the best time to post to get the highest reach.

• Native social networks: You can also track your reach metrics directly via each native social media platform. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, reach can be measured through the "Reach" metric in the Insights tab. On TikTok, you can find it under the “Analytics” tab under the “Creators tool” section. Rest assured that every social media platform will be measuring “Reach” for your social account, but you might just find them within different areas of each platform.

What is an example of social media reach?

Let’s say you post a video on your TikTok account, which has 200,000 followers. If half of your followers see your TikTok video, then you’d have a reach of 100,000. However, 10,000 of your followers share the video with a friend and 5,000 people find your video through the hashtag you added in the caption. In the end, you have a total reach of 115,000 for that TikTok video. 

How to increase reach on Instagram?

Here are a couple of great ways to increase your reach and get Instagram content in front of more people:

• Feature user-generated content: Incorporating user-generated content (UGC)—content produced by fans and customers—into your social media marketing strategy is a great way to build a community and increase your reach.
• Use hashtags: Brands can use hashtags to increase their visibility and reach a wider audience, leading to increased brand exposure and recognition.
• Work with influencers: Working with an influencer has the power to drive traffic to your site, amplify your message across social media platforms, and even directly sell your product through their recommendation.
• Post when your audience is online: The best way to maximize your reach is to post when your followers are online and engaging with your posts. If you don’t have time to figure it out, Buffer automatically does it for you, for free.