How to analyze and optimize your reach on Facebook

For growing businesses who are exploring the world of online marketing, Facebook reach is an essential piece of a much larger puzzle. Understanding how to analyze as well as how to optimize your online reach is paramount to being a successful marketer. These aspects will allow you to increase visibility and gain a wider audience, thus offering greater potential for expanding your business.

Curious about the strategies you should take to understand how to best engage with your Facebook audience? Well, look no further as we have compiled all of the important details regarding analyzing and optimizing your content.

Here’s how to analyze your Facebook reach

What is Facebook reach?

Essentially, Facebook reach is translated into a concrete number that lets you know how many people have seen your content within a certain period of time. In some cases, reach can be referred to as “unique impressions.” However, it’s important to note that there is a distinction between impressions and reach, as impressions show how often content is actually seen by those you reached. Confusing? Consider that a single user can view the same Facebook post more than once, and therefore, the impressions can be equal to or greater than the unique reach itself.

We should also state that there is a difference between page reach and post reach. Page reach will offer you a number that is aligned with the number of people who viewed any content on your page and is not necessarily tied to a specific post. In contrast, post reach describes the number of people who saw a specific post on your page, rather than the entire page itself.

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How to analyze Facebook reach

Facebook breaks down reach in intervals, and there are three distinctive intervals for reach. The first is your daily reach, and this number signifies how many people you reached in a single, specific day. The second interval is the weekly reach, and this value shows the number of people reached in the last 7 days. Finally, the third value lists the number of people reached monthly, or in a 28 day period. Both the 28 and the 7-day figure also offer a value per each individual day.

With these intervals in mind, it is crucial to mention that if you are analyzing reach based on periods of time, it can only be measured in intervals of 1, 7 or 28 days.

Organic, unpaid and paid Facebook reach

In a nutshell, organic reach refers to the number of people who have found their way to your page or content without it being sponsored, or unpaid. However, in the context of Facebook, organic reach refers to something slightly different. Facebook defines organic reach by the concrete number of people who visited or saw your page, as well as those who came across one of your posts in a newsfeed. For this reason, it is important to bear in mind that users may not necessarily be interacting with your content, though they may come across it. Also, this excludes sponsored posts as well as ads.

On the other hand, viral reach is the number of unique browsers who saw your content as based on shares or publications by friends as well as other individuals in your network. This can include page likes, comments, shares but will also include those who respond to events as well as simple mentions of your page and tags on your images.

Finally, paid reach should be a straightforward concept at this point. This simply signifies the number of unique people who saw one of your ads or other content as based on a sponsored post, in other words, content that has been paid for.

How to optimize Facebook content to get more reach

Consider post characteristics that lead to higher reach

Since Facebook offers up the data for you to determine how your posts are performing, start here by analyzing it and looking for patterns within your posts. Do you find specific post aspects that lead to high or low reach? This process may involve a bit of trial and error which should include testing out well-performing aspects to different audiences over and over again. However, it should move you closer to understanding how to interact with your Facebook audience by way of your content. 

Virality

The viral abilities of your Facebook posts can give you a clear idea of how many people are commenting on, sharing and liking your things and the reasons why they may be doing so. Looking at these aspects will show you which post characteristics lead to a greater virality. Pay special attention to viral reach in comparison with your total reach and find patterns that seem to lead to higher virality.

Look for posts with the highest reach

This might seem like an obvious option when it comes to understanding your online content, but it is the quickest way to identify which posts reached the most users on average. For example, if you find that content which includes images or videos has a much higher reach than that without, it would be worthwhile to consider your content plan and work according to how your audience is responding!

Time-based reach

Finally, something that any business working in the realm of online marketing knows a thing or two about is good timing. There are specific hours of the day when a post will receive more attention than others. Another thing worth mentioning is that consistency is key for post reach. If you post an article every Monday morning and are finding that it has a high reach, then continue to do this. However, if you are posting a photo every Friday at 4 PM on the dot and it’s unable to garner a handful of likes, chances are you should consider posting at a different time.