Reach metrics

What is social media reach?

Social media reach is a measure of the number of people who see content posted on social media. It’s one of several social media metrics, which are specific kinds of data that show how users see and interact with content on social media. Marketing departments may measure social media metrics like reach during the planning and evaluation stages of campaigns to understand who their content is reaching and whether it’s effective. Here are some things social media reach can give you information on:

• Success of individual campaigns
• Number of active followers
• Impact of partnerships with influencers and other brands
• Online reach beyond social media
• Relative effectiveness of different platforms
• Response and interest in online events and launches

You can present your social media reach in two ways: as a number of users or as a percentage of your total follower count. Some social media platforms directly tell you your reach by letting you know how many users saw an individual post. You may choose to calculate the percentage to put that number in the context of your whole audience.

Why is it important to measure social media reach?

By tracking reach, you can better understand how large your customer base is and how effective your marketing strategies are at putting your content in front of potential customers. Because social media reach measures unique visitors rather than counting the same viewer multiple times, it can give you a more accurate idea of how many individual potential customers you have than similar metrics like impressions. As you track reach over time, you can measure how your brand awareness is growing. Reach can provide a more accurate number of how many people are actually seeing your content than followers. The algorithms that sort how information appears on social media sites may not show your original posts to all followers, and some followers may be bot or spam accounts, which can be why your reach is smaller than your total follower count. The advantage to reach is that it usually indicates when a user actually views your post.

What are the types of reach?

Some sites break down reach into types based on how the user saw the content. Here are some common types of reach:

• Organic reach: Organic reach counts visitors who see your content from your original, non-sponsored, non-advertisement posts.
• Paid reach: Paid reach counts users who see your paid content like ads.
• Viral reach: Viral reach counts how many visitors see your content because other users have interacted with it by sharing it or reacting to it.

Social media reach is a useful metric that can be used to track:

• Hashtag reach: branded hashtags, hashtag campaigns
• Reach of social media marketing campaigns
• Reach in online media: industry media, blogs, discussion forums, etc.
• Reach of competitors
• Reach of events
• Reach of social media profiles
• Reach of influencers

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are the metrics you can keep track of overtime and assess the changes in the performance of your marketing actions. It can be done in a simple spreadsheet. You can similarly track your competitors. Social media analytics can help you discover new insights, and draw conclusions from your startegy. Social media reach may also be used as one of the indicators that will help you get a better understanding of your brand awareness.

What can affect your social media reach?

These are some factors that can affect how many people your social media content reaches:

• Time of post: If more of your followers are online when you post, you are likely to reach more people with that specific post. The time of day, week or even month can determine how much of your audience is online.
• Content: Content that’s entertaining, interesting or otherwise valuable to your audience can encourage many more shares and a larger reach.
• Call to action: The call to action is any request for the viewer to respond to the post, whether it’s by clicking a link, signing a petition, buying a product or signing up for something. An effective call to action might encourage users to share your post with their networks, leading to a larger overall reach.
• Search terms: Content that includes common search terms, trending topics or related hashtags can be more likely to show up in user searches and can have a wider reach.

Hashtags

Hashtags are a simple, yet powerful tool in the hands of marketers. They can do much more than categorize social media conversations, connect people, and look cool. First, however, you need to know how to use them. If your company is keen on building a strong social media presence, using branded hashtags is a must. Social media reach of your branded hashtags can become your social media KPI. You can track on the monthly basis whether the social media reach of your hashtag increases or decreases. You also need to set a goal. You might want to increase your company social media reach by creating a social media strategy which will be focused on driving engagement and sharing your hashtagged social media posts — more people will get to see it.

Marketing campaigns

Social media and non-social reach can be a KPI’snot only when it comes to social media performance, but also while tracking the performance of marketing campaigns. By measuring reach, you can see how your marketing campaign spreads in social media and beyond and how many users it reaches. The more people it reaches, the better, or course. Whether it’s a marketing campaign or awareness campaign the goal there is the same — to reach as many users on the web as possible. If you launch marketing campaigns often enough, your KPI here should be to increase the social media reach of each next campaign.

Events

If you do social media marketing for events, social and non-social reach should be some of the top KPI’s in relation to your event marketing. What’s worth saying here is that social media reach of your event can be tracked before, during, and after the event. Social media content related your event should reach as many people as possible — the more people stumble upon it in social media, the bigger likelihood that the number of attendees increases, sponsors or speakers increases. Measuring social media reach of an event tells you what buzz your event generates and how many people it reaches. The more people stumble upon your event in social media, the bigger likelihood that the number of attendees increases. Creating an event hashtag is a must. Also, it’s good to encourage participants to use it in their social media posts about the event.