What is Social Media Reach?
The “reach” of your company or brand refers to the percentage of your target audience that you reach through your marketing (including social media marketing). Why does it matter, though?
Generally, a relatively small percentage of the people who have the potential to become supporters and customers see your latest tweet, post, or marketing campaign. But by being more intentional about how, when, and where you market to those individuals, you can build more relationships that’ll lead to more sales down the road.
Ways to increase your reach on social media
To boost your reach on social media, you can:
- Start and join conversations. Encourage your audience and other brands to discuss industry-related topics (and even unrelated fun stuff occasionally). Get involved in social media groups and communities within your industry. Respond to comments, answer questions, and be helpful. People will notice.
- Run influencer marketing campaigns with influencers who have a similar audience to yours. If you pick the right partners, this can be a quick way to gain the trust of ideal customers, get leads, and make sales.
- Encourages your audience to create and share user-generated content. In addition to reminding people to retweet and share your content on the regular, you can also spark bursts of increased reach by running user-generated content campaigns.
- Contests work well to get people engaged and spreading the word about you. For example, “Tag us in a video on [something related to your brand or industry], we’ll choose our 5 favorites, and winners will get [a desirable offer].”
Related: Learn more about Facebook contests and Instagram giveaways. Be sure to follow the guidelines or your account can get suspended.
How to measure social media reach
The following metrics are useful for tracking your reach:
- Impressions. This is the number of times your content was visible on screen. You could think of it as the first stage of reach, which refers more to the number of people who actually saw or, even better, interacted with your posts.
- Engagement rate. What percentage of people who saw your latest post liked, commented on, or shared it? On average, how many people like, comment on share your post? The answer = your engagement rates. If they’re trending upward or holding steady at or above the average for your industry, that’s great!
- Brand mentions. It doesn’t matter whether you’re tagged or not, keep an eye out for discussions about your brand, notice whether they’re increasing or decreasing, and what the overwhelming sentiment is.
- Most platforms including Instagram and Twitter allow you to view impressions, engagement rate, and other metrics for individual posts and your accounts in general. Plus, you can track brand mentions manually. However, this isn’t the most efficient way to go.
