What Is Facebook Reach And How Can You Increase Yours?

Do you monitor your Facebook reach?

Let’s start by looking at what Facebook reach is…

To put it simply, Facebook reach represents the number of unique users who see your post or page. For example, if you publish a post and 50 people see it, your reach is 50 people. Simple.

Facebook tracks the number of unique screens your post has displayed on which is how they record the reach of your content.

One thing to note, is that Facebook reach is always measured within a specific time period which means the metrics are not showing overall reach of a post. Therefore, it is sensible for marketeers to monitor daily, weekly, or monthly reach.
Another notable point is that Facebook is monitoring the unique screens that the post has appeared on, obviously it has no idea if the person sitting in front of that screen has seen the content unless they engage on the post.

Posts will vary when it comes to their reach, because the reach is influenced by numerous factors including engagement and interactions, paid ads v’s organic content and content type and optimisation factors such as timing, video, or text.

What is the difference between Facebook reach, engagement, and impressions?

These 3 terms are often used together but represent different KPI’s.

• Reach measures how many unique people saw your content, as explained above.
• Impressions measure the number of views your content has had. This includes repeat impressions and someone seeing the same content twice. Your impressions will always be higher than your reach.
• Engagement measures the interactions your content has had. This includes reactions, comments, and shares.

While reach and impressions are important, it is just as important to drive engagement. The more interactions you are getting on your content, the more likely the Facebook algorithm is to show your content to more people, therefore increasing your reach and impressions.

There are some dos and don’ts when it comes to trying to increase your Facebook reach:

• Don’t simply duplicate your captions across all social platforms – make sure you craft unique captions for each platform
• Don’t use too many external links moving users away from Facebook
• Include calls to actions – eg comment below with your tips etc.
• Make sure you post consistently on your page. This lets the algorithm know you are active – You can use tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite for this
• Utilise video content. Video should play a part in your strategy as this type of content is more likely to go ‘viral’ through likes and shares.
• Time your posts when your followers are online! This will certainly help to increase your reach.
• Get in front of more people by using Facebook ads. The fierce competition to break though content organically has meant more people are using Facebook ads to get seen. It is a relatively inexpensive way to get in front of new people.

Monitoring your reach:

Facebook monitors your reach page wide or on a per post level. Reach will always go up and down, so it is worth looking at your reach on a long-term basis and trying to spot trends.

Use Facebook Insights to look at the posts that have the highest reach, can you see any similarities in them – style, format, length etc?

Increasing your reach may seem daunting, but if you take the time to analyse your content and follow the above dos and don’ts you will soon see improvement on your reach.

If you are struggling with your social media and are looking to outsource this aspect of your marketing, then get in touch. We have a team of social media experts on hand to help strategise and streamline your social content.