What is reach?

Reach is the total number of people seeing your content. Think of reach as the number of active people seeing and engaging with your content. In an ideal world, every single one of your followers would see the piece of content that you’re distributing on your social media platforms.

Contrary to popular belief, that’s not how things work on social media, and not every single post you publish will be seen by all your followers. Twitter, for example, has 17 million subscribers, but its organic content is not close to having that amount of views because only a fraction of its audience sees it.

Other instances where reach is measured

In advertising, media, and marketing, reach is the number of unique users to whom your ad has been displayed. In digital marketing, this may refer to the number of unique users a digital advertisement has reached, not the total number of interactions it has generated.

Reaching is typically followed by intensity: when reaching you will be able to tell how many users you have hit, and the frequency will tell you how many times your followers have clicked or engaged with your content.

Although reach and frequency are becoming easier to quantify within the digital realm, there is still much to think about in terms of de-duplicating reach across the walled gardens (Google, Amazon, and Facebook) and across apps.

This means that while reach is more reliable, it is still not possible to offer a true representation of how many users were exposed and attained during a campaign.

Reach in the context of a social media campaign

Increased engagement is one common goal behind every social media campaign. If your content doesn’t get likes, responses, or shares, there’s something wrong — either on the creation or targeting end.

Before engagement comes awareness, and reach and impressions drive people to take action. These two techniques go hand in hand and you can’t have one without the other.

Fun fact:

Tracking your reach, impressions, and engagement shouldn’t be complicated. With SocialBee, you have all this data and more in one single convenient place.