What Is Facebook Reach? (Your Full Guide)

Facebook marketing is a vital part of many businesses. Furthermore, both large and small businesses alike rely on this platform to sell products and find new customers. 

However, there are many metrics involved with advertising on Facebook. Whether you’re purchasing advertisements or trying to drive traffic organically, there are many things to keep track of, including reach. So, let’s take a look at this metric below. 

What Is Facebook Reach In [currentyear]?

Facebook reach is how many unique people view your content during a specific time period in [currentyear]. Additionally, Facebook tracks reach via daily, weekly, and 28-day timelines. Furthermore, each screen is only counted once in each time period, so this metric only measures how many unique people have seen a particular post. Often, this metric is only an estimate. 

For more information on growing Facebook reach and how to determine if yours is good, keep reading! 

What is a Good Reach on Facebook?

On Facebook, the average reach is 5.2% of the page’s total likes. 

Therefore, if you have that amount of reach or over, you’re getting a good reach. If you’re below these numbers, then you likely need to work on increasing your reach. 

However, some industries simply have a lower reach. Often, this is because people don’t tend to engage with that content all the time. 

Therefore, while 5.2% is a good indicator, it won’t work exactly for every industry and company. 

Typically, your best option is to review the specific reach averages for your type of content and industry.

 Of course, the best way to do this would be to view your competitor’s reach directly and try to beat their rate; however, this usually isn’t possible. 

Instead, you usually have to rely on what others in your industry report. 

How is Facebook Reach Calculated?

Calculating your Facebook reach is typically pretty straightforward. 

Furthermore, to do so, find the number of users that were reached by your post, and you can find this information on Facebook Insights. 

Next, divide this number by the total page likes (or your followers, depending on what sort of profile you have). 

With that said, this can get a bit confusing, as Facebook measures reach in daily, weekly, and 28-day intervals. 

Therefore, the reach will vary depending on the time you’re using to calculate, as daily reach will always be smaller than weekly reach (as weekly reach is seven days of reach added together). 

Additionally, remember, that reach only counts for unique screens. Therefore, your post may show up to a user once or twice, however, it only counts them as one person. 

Also, a single person may count towards today’s daily reach and tomorrow’s daily reach. 

After all, those are two different timelines, and that person can count as a unique view towards both. 

Alternatively, if you’re looking at weekly reach, then that person can only count once – even if they looked at the post on two different days. 

Is Facebook Reach Important?

Is Facebook Reach Important?

Facebook reach is important as it gives you an idea of how many people are actually seeing your posts. 

Furthermore, if that number is extremely low, it will affect other metrics, like your engagement. 

Of course, Facebook reach isn’t the whole story as a lot goes into marketing on a social media platform like Facebook. 

However, reach is one metric that you should pay at least some attention to. 

This is because Facebook’s reach represents the number of people that see your posts. 

Usually, these people will have already liked or followed your page. However, when someone engages with your post, their friends may also see the post. 

Therefore, the reach can also represent new potential customers who haven’t liked your page. 

So, the more reach you have, the more new customers you may be getting, too. 

Furthermore, growing your Facebook reach usually involves increasing engagement on your account.

Why is my Facebook Reach so Low?

When your Facebook reach is average, you likely won’t notice it very much. However, when it gets low, engagement can fall across your whole page. 

Often, there are a few reasons your Facebook reach may be low, and usually, this comes down to engagement. 

For example, if your engagement is low, then your follower’s friends aren’t going to see the post and Facebook isn’t going to show it to more people. 

Therefore, increasing your engagement should increase your reach since engagement and reach feed into each other. 

However, there may be other reasons for this. For one, Facebook might not think your posts are relevant, and if this happens, they may not show it. 

Therefore, even very engaging posts may not get onto news feeds if the relevance is low. 

Furthermore, Facebook determines relevance based on what it thinks the users will do. 

So, if your audience tends to engage most with a certain type of post, using that type of post will make your relevance increase. 

Often, utilizing A/B testing is the best way to figure this out. Sometimes, it can take very little change to completely overhaul your relevance. 

How Can I Increase my Reach on Facebook?

Increasing reach often increases engagement, and engagement also increases reach. 

Therefore, what increases one usually increases the other. 

Furthermore, optimizing your content is vital for both reach and engagement. 

So, you want your posts to drive engagement and make the Facebook algorithm happy. 

Timing can also play a big role as you want your posts to be timed correctly. Otherwise, you can potentially miss your audience. 

Therefore, research when your audience tends to be on Facebook and post during those times. 

Scheduling your posts is often a great idea in this regard, as it ensures that your post appears when it needs to. 

To know more, you can also read our posts on Facebook Editor, Facebook Workplace, and Facebook Engagement Rating.

Conclusion

Facebook reach is a measurement of how many people saw your content over a specific period. Often, this metric is measured in daily, weekly, or monthly periods.  Furthermore, each person only counts once within a time period.

Therefore, this metric is an estimate of how many people saw your post. However, it cannot count for two or more people viewing on the same screen, so it is only an estimate. 

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Marques Thomas

Marques Thomas graduated with a MBA in 2011. Since then, Marques has worked in the retail and consumer service industry as a manager, advisor, and marketer. Marques is also the head writer and founder of QuerySprout.com.

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