“Reach” refers to the number of unique users who see a brand’s post on social media platforms.
Detailed explanation
In other words, social media reach quantifies the number of users who are exposed to a piece of content. It’s a popular marketing metric to measure engagement and visibility on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn and more.
The higher a brand’s reach, the more “visible” it is to its followers and subscribers. In an ideal world, every single follower would view your content.
Like social media reach, impressions are another important metric for marketers to gauge engagement. While similar, these metrics aren’t exactly the same. Reach is the number of unique viewers who see your content, while social media impressions are the number of times a piece of content is viewed. The same user can view a post multiple times and increase the number of impressions, but they only count as one unique viewer in reach metrics.
For example, let’s say John follows your account on Instagram. He watched your most recent Instagram Reel you posted five times. This counts as five impressions but equates to one reach.
To calculate social media reach, use the following formula:
Social media reach = Number of views / Number of followers x 100
Suppose you have 5,000 TikTok followers and 3,500 of them see your content. Your reach is:
3,500 / 5,000 x 100 = 70%
Remember: a social media post’s reach can exceed the number of followers you have. To avoid complicated calculations, use social media toolkits like Google Analytics, Hootsuite and HubSpot to help track reach, impressions and other marketing metrics.