How to improve your Facebook reach in 2020

Increasing your Facebook reach can be a challenging and time-consuming task. In many ways, it’s both the starting point and the end goal of Facebook marketing.

Your brand’s Facebook reach is the foundation upon which many of your other Facebook metrics — such as comments, likes, and impressions — are built upon. Without any Facebook reach, your content will exist without purpose or visibility on Facebook.

But at the same time, if you want to improve your Facebook reach and get more likes and comments, you need to ensure that your content is already racking up likes and comments, the very thing you need reach to get.

If this whirlwind of paradoxes makes your head spin, you’re not alone. Facebook reach is a strange but powerful beast: it’s hard to tame and get under control, but it can prove to be a mighty companion.

Here, we’re going to try to make sense of Facebook reach and how it can help grow your brand.

What is Facebook reach?

The concept of Facebook reach itself is fairly easy to understand, but it is quite nuanced. In short, your Facebook reach is simply the number of unique users who see your post or page, regardless of whether they engaged with it. So, if you make a post and 100 people look at it, your reach is 100 people.

Facebook reach is always measured within a specified period. That means you can’t simply get a metric for your overall reach. Instead, you need to look at your daily, weekly or monthly reach.

Obviously, Facebook has no way of actually tracking how many literal eyes see your posts while scrolling through their newsfeed. So Facebook simply tracks how many unique screens your post displays on.

In the past, a post’s reach was based on how many unique users loaded the post in their newsfeed, even if it never displayed on their screen. However, this changed in February 2018, so marketers who are familiar with the old way of measuring reach should be readjusted to the updated method by now.

Facebook Reach vs. impressions

Now, it’s important to make a distinction between Facebook reach and impressions. Unlike reach, which measures how many unique viewers your post has, impressions measure how many times your content was displayed. It does not measure unique viewers. So if your post was served up to the same person three times, your impression count will increase by three. Theoretically, you could have a post with a reach of 1 and with 100 impressions.

With the definition of impressions in hand, we can now revisit the definition of Facebook reach with more clarity as to the number of unique users viewing your post within a specified period versus the total number of views (including repeat views).

Facebook Reach vs. engagement         

Anyone marketing their business on Facebook must be aware that reach is not a form of engagement. Rather, Facebook reach is a precursor to engagement: as your reach increases, so does the probability of engagements, simply because your content is appearing in front of more users. Thanks to the Facebook algorithm, more engagement can actually boost your reach, so while they are connected in some ways, they are two separate metrics.

Types of Facebook Reach

Page reach vs. post reach

Facebook divides reach into two main categories: page reach and post reach.

Post reach is a measure of any individual post’s unique impressions within a specified time period.

Page reach is a measure of how many unique users saw any of a page’s posts within a specified time period.

It’s possible to have a high page reach and a low post reach or vice versa. If you post very often, you may have a high page reach and a low post reach, but if you post less frequently you might have a low page reach and a high post reach.

You’ll need to take your overarching brand strategy into account to determine whether you should be focusing on increasing your post or page reach. If brand awareness is your goal, increasing your page reach is usually the better target.

Organic, paid and viral Facebook reach

Page and post reach can each be divided into three further categories.

Organic reach is the number of unique users who saw your content after you posted it for free on your page.

Paid reach is the number of unique users who saw your paid Facebook content, such as a Facebook ad or a boosted post.

Viral reach is the number of unique users who saw your Facebook content because one of their friends engaged with it by liking, commenting, or sharing it.

Each of these terms can be applied to both page and post reach, so you can refer to a post’s organic reach, a page’s paid reach and so on.

Other types of reach

Facebook provides a few other less common metrics that brands can use to measure their reach.

Facebook Reach by city tells you how many unique users in a specific city saw your content within a specified time period.

Facebook Reach by country tells you how many unique users in a specific country saw your content within a specified time period.

Facebook Reach by demographics tells you how many unique users of specific demographics, such as men between 18-24 or women 40-59, saw your content within a specified time period.

Although these measures of reach are less common than organic, paid and viral reach, they can still be incredibly useful.

For example, if a small bakery owner in Denver is trying to attract customers, they should keep an eye on their reach by city. But if their viral reach is off the charts, and mostly in Krakow, Poland, it’s not going to drive the results the brand is looking for.

The state of organic vs. paid Facebook reach

From 2012 to 2014, the organic reach of branded Facebook posts decreased by approximately 90%.

The reason for this downtrend is twofold. First, the sheer amount of branded content popping up on Facebook has increased dramatically since the platform’s birth. More brands fighting for attention means more competition, and there’s only so much of the organic-reach pie to go around.

Secondly, Facebook began implementing changes to its News Feed algorithm in 2018 that prioritizes content from friends and family, especially by favoring content that promotes engagement. Clearly, this could put branded content at an immediate disadvantage.

More generally, Facebook is making an effort to promote content that encourages user-to-user interaction, primarily with other users who are close to them.

According to Lauren Scissors, Head of News Feed Research at Facebook, the driving philosophy behind the changes is that “interacting with people, like having a conversation or reminiscing about things you’ve shared, is associated with a greater sense of well-being, and the benefits are even stronger when you’re close to the person, and when the interaction requires some effort.”

Because of this, it’s generally easier to increase paid Facebook reach on Facebook than it is to increase organic or viral reach.