How to Quickly Measure Social Media Reach in 2024?

10 min read

Social media reach is one of the social media metrics you can track to assess the impact of your marketing activities both on social media platforms and beyond. Here’s how.

How to Measure Social Media Reach

If you want to be more aware of how effective are your online marketing activities and if they are performing as planned, you came to the right place.

Inside this article, you will learn everything about social media reach – one of the most important metrics that will deliver you many insights and will help you draw conclusions considering your social media marketing strategy.

Here is an agenda of what we will be looking into:

Social media reach: definition

At Brand24, we’ve put a lot of time and effort into developing our social media reach calculator and algorithm. Here’s what our social media reach is made of:

Social media reach is an estimated number of social media users that could have contact with a social media post. It’s based on the number of followers, fans, subscribers, connections, and visibility percentage. Visibility percentage is an estimation of what part of an audience usually sees a social media post on a particular social media platform.

Here’s our short video in which Chia explains social media reach and impressions, and the difference between them:

When it comes to the sources of social media reach, media monitoring tools or at least Brand24 analyze content from:

  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Quora
  • TikTok
  • Twitch
  • Telegram

Social media reach is one of the most important social media metrics. It helps you track your social media efforts, measure performance, and learn about your social media brand awareness.

Brand24 is a tool that measures social media reach. Give it a spin during a 14-day free trial!

Non-social reach

On the other hand, there’s non-social reach.

Non-social reach can be really helpful in estimating the overall reach of a topic, brand name, product name, campaign name, hashtag, or actually any other keyword on the web.

Non-social reach is an estimated number of contacts with a piece of content beyond social media. Non-social reach is based on the number of domains mentioning a piece of content, the average monthly visits number on a given domain, and the Visibility Ratio which describes how big was the exposition of a piece of content.

In practice, the sources of non-social reach include:

  • News sites
  • Blogs
  • Discussion forums
  • Review sites
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Other websites with public content

Reach as a key performance indicator

Social media KPIs are not that obvious.

Social media managers often find it problematic to measure the effectiveness of their social media work and this is where reach can be helpful.

There are also brand managers and PR managers who can use non-social reach to measure the reach of content connected to their brand.

If you’re a marketer, the reach can become one of the key performance indicators – metrics you can keep track of to see if the reach of your content increases.

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

Use the Brand24 tool to measure and increase the social media reach!

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are the metrics you can keep track of over time 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 strategy.

Social media reach may also be used as one of the indicators that will help you get a better understanding of your brand awareness.

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.

Just like Shimano has its #rideshimano hashtag:

Source: https://twitter.com/ShimanoROAD/status/909437401377968128

Such a branded hashtag does not only boosts brand awareness, connects Shimano users and customers, but also gives Shimano an easy way to measure how many social media users use the hashtag, who they are, what they talk about, and, finally, what social media reach the hashtag generates.

The social media reach of your branded hashtags can become your social media KPI. You can track on a monthly basis whether the social media reach of your hashtag increases or decreases.

hashtags

Calculate the social media reach of your hashtags!

You also need to set a goal. You might want to increase your company’s social media reach by creating a social media strategy that 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 KPIs not 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 on social media and beyond and how many users it reaches. The more people it reaches, the better, of course.

#MeToo is one of the most popular campaigns that have gone viral in October.

Marketing Campaigns

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.

But how to do it is another story.

Calculate the social media reach of your marketing campaign!

Events

If you do social media marketing for events, social and non-social reach should be some of the top KPIs in relation to your event marketing.

What’s worth saying here is that the social media reach of your event can be tracked before, during, and after the event.

Social media content related to your event should reach as many people as possible — the more people stumble upon it on social media, the bigger likelihood that the number of attendees increases, sponsors, or speakers increases.

Measuring the 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 on 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.

Source: https://twitter.com/INBOUND/status/859787746042400768

Above you can see that Inbound uses the #INBOUND17 hashtag. If you’re planning an event, think about your event hashtag. It will then let you measure the social media reach of your event.

How to calculate social media reach

One of the ways to calculate social media reach is to use a social media monitoring tool, for example, Brand24.

Among many features within the tool’s panel, you get the chance to measure the social media reach of social media posts, hashtags, and accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Social media monitoring tracks in real-time any keywords of your choice. It tracks them in real-time across all the Web: social media platforms, websites, news sites, blogs, discussion forums, and other places.

This way, you can track, for example, your company name, company hashtag, event hashtag, the name of a marketing campaign, a social media profile, and more.

The most important pieces of data are inside the summary tab, including graphs showing the number of mentions and their social media reach day by day:

The analysis tab is where you can find most of the social media analytics. You will find there the most important bits of data about social media reach as well. This is where you can identify social media profiles of the highest social media reach and more.

Brand24 has some other useful features that can help you build and monitor the performance of your social media presence. Some of them include detecting the most influential authors, the most interactive mentions, email alerts, Slack integration, monitoring hashtag performance on Instagram, Twitter, and much more.

If you feel like that’s what you need, you can try Brand24 out. It’s absolutely free and no credit card is required.

Set up Brand24 to measure the social media reach of your profiles!

Reach calculator, conclusion, and other social media metrics

I’m sure your marketing team puts a lot of marketing efforts into running engaging campaigns and increasing the average engagement rate. Yet, as social media platforms constantly cut reach, it’s not easy nowadays.

If you’re curious about how far your posts actually reach, and whether or not your social media efforts are worth the time and energy, Brand24 is a great tool to help you measure this.

By using a reach calculator, you can get an idea of how many people saw your post, as well as what percentage of that target audience was reached.

Armed with this information, you can make more informed decisions about which social platforms to focus your energies on, what type of content to share, and even where to allocate your advertising budget. Furthermore, you can evaluate what’s working and increase the social media engagement rate.

Want to measure social media reach? Try the Brand24 tool during a 14-day free trial!

Read also how to measure a social media campaign and learn about other social media metrics to track.

Frequently Asked Questions

What social media reach means?

“Social media reach” refers to the total number of unique users who have seen a specific piece of content on a social media platform. Unlike impressions, which may count multiple views by the same user, reach measures the size of the potential audience for that content. It’s a metric used to gauge the visibility and potential influence of a post, account, or campaign.

What is an example of a social media reach?

An example of social media reach would be if you post a photo on Instagram and that photo is seen by 500 unique users. In this case, the social media reach of that specific post would be 500. This number indicates the size of the audience that has been exposed to your content.

How is social media reach measured?

Social media reach is measured using analytics tools provided by the social media platforms themselves or third-party analytics software. These tools track the number of unique users who have seen or been exposed to a particular piece of content, be it a post, story, or an entire campaign.

What is a good social reach?

A “good” social media reach varies based on factors like industry, audience size, and campaign goals. It’s often beneficial to have a reach that is a significant portion of your total followers. Comparing your reach to industry standards or competitors can also be useful. Ultimately, the value of reach is best judged alongside other metrics like engagement and conversion rates. Trends over time and the quality of engagement are also important considerations.

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