Organic Reach on Social Media: Is It Still Important?

While some people have tried to label organic reach a vanity metric, it’s far from it.

Organic reach is one of the most important metrics for social media because other metrics depend on it.

But as important as it is, it has declined over the years, as social media platforms want businesses to run more ads.

With the decline in organic reach, should we still put much effort into increasing it?

This post will answer that question, what you need to know about reach, and how to improve it.

What is organic reach?

Organic reach is the number of people who view a particular piece of content during a period.

Organic reach differs from impressions, which count the number of times a post is seen. So, if David sees your post 5 times, that’s 5 impressions and 1 reach.

Organic reach is important because it lets you:

• Know the number of people you reach
• Understand how engaging your content is
• Compare your numbers with competitors’

Because of the drop in organic reach, many have advised businesses to pivot to social media ads.

However, you can’t build all your content strategy on ads.

Once a person clicks your ads a few times, ad fatigue will creep in, and they may stop clicking.

Then, some content types like behind-the-scenes content may be more suited to organic posts.

So, even if you run ads, you still need to reach prospects and customers through organic posts.

How to track reach

Here’s how to check reach for popular social media platforms.

Some of them don’t use reach explicitly. For example, you’ll see Viewers in both Facebook and TikTok.

To know your reach on Facebook, log in to your Meta Business Suite page. Facebook now shows the View metric instead of reach.

On the left sidebar, click Insights > Views > Viewers.

Visit your business account profile on the Instagram app and click Professional dashboard.

Then, Views > Accounts reached

Visit TikTok and click More at the left sidebar. Then, TikTok Studio > Analytics > Viewers.

Here, you’ll see the total number of post viewers, new viewers, viewer insights, and their most active times.

On the TikTok app, visit your profile and click TikTok Studio > Analytics > Viewers.

To view reach on X, navigate to the left sidebar and click Creator Studio > Analytics. However, you have to be an X Premium subscriber to access advanced profile analytics.

How to boost organic reach for social media content

1. Spice up your content with variety

Publishing various content types will engage your audience and make them anticipate future posts. 

And once this happens, social media algorithms will show your posts to them, which means more reach.

Another reason to experiment with more content types is that effective content types can change with time. You want to be on top of these changes.

According to Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri, “What works and resonates today might not work next month or next year.”

Some content ideas you can explore include:

• Featuring user-generated content: Encourage customers to create content with your product and feature the content on your profile.
• Collaborating with influencers: Reach out to influencers in your industry to create content around your product.
• Doing giveaways: Give your audience an opportunity to win your products.
• Creating polls: Engage and collect information from your audience through polls.
• Behind-the-scenes content: Show your audience how your employees create their favorite products.

By exploring various content types, you’ll give people more ways to engage with your content.

2. Optimize content for social search 

With millions of social media users finding posts through the search box, you can reach more people by optimizing your posts for relevant keywords.

For example, 64% of Gen Zs and 49% of millennials used TikTok as a search engine in 2024, according to Statista.

In addition to that, 41% of consumers used TikTok as a search engine in the same year.

Optimizing your posts means adding the right information to your post to help people discover it through social search.

Apart from people who see your post on their timeline, search can expose it to thousands more.

But apart from showing up on social search, you can also show up in Google searches.

To optimize your content for social search: 

• List all the relevant keywords for a post
• Add keywords naturally to post captions
• Use relevant hashtags
• Add location tags to reach a specific audience

Optimizing your post for social search will only take a few minutes, but it can help you reach thousands of people over time.

3. Publish posts when your audience is online

Publishing social media posts when your audience is online can give your post the initial boost it needs to go viral.

Whenever a post is published, algorithms watch how users react to it within the first few minutes to hours.

It uses the engagement during this time to determine whether to push the post to a wider audience or condemn it to oblivion.

If your post is published when your ideal audience is online, it can get the initial traction, which will tell algorithms to push it to more people.

How do you know when your audience is online?

• Predict and experiment: If your audience lives mainly in New York, you can publish posts at times when they’ll be off work in the afternoon. Publish at multiple times and track performance.
• Check account analytics: To know when your audience is online, check your analytics dashboard. For example, on an Instagram business account, go to your Profile>Professional dashboard>New followers>Most active times to see when your audience is online.
• Use the best time to post feature: If you schedule your post with a social media management tool, it can suggest the best time to publish your post based on performance history.

If you have other engagements when your audience is online, you can use a social media scheduler to schedule posts.

Even while you’re busy with other things, your post will appear at the set time, and your audience can engage with it.

4. Create more video content

As social media platforms pivot towards video content, they reward accounts that create video content with more reach.

For example, if you create content on Instagram, you’ll find that reels often outperform other Instagram content formats.

So, to get your post in front of more people, you have to create more video content.

How do you do this?

• Invest in video gear and editing software: A smartphone and a tripod stand can be good enough as your video gear, but you can go higher if your budget allows. Editing software like CapCut and Canva are also good for editing videos.
• Encourage employees to get in front of the camera: A lot of the content will be created by employees, sometimes outside the social media team. Employees need to understand why that is necessary.
• Create suitable videos for each platform: While it’s tempting to create a single video and publish on all social platforms, it may be ineffective. Study what works on each platform and create videos accordingly. Use Adidas as an inspiration, as they use different videos on Instagram and TikTok.

As you create video content, you’ll become better at it and reach more people with your content.

5. Track the change in reach

Tracking the change in reach will help you understand how well your content strategy is delivering results.

As you update your strategy and set goals, you need to track changes in reach to determine performance.

To track your reach, you can visit each platform to view the numbers.

Alternatively, visit your social media management tool to see all the numbers in one place.

Beyond just tracking change in reach, also track underlying engagement metrics that affect reach.

For example, Adam Mosseri says that if you want to optimize for reach on Instagram, you should pay attention to average watch time (for reels), likes per people reached, and sends per people reached.

Track your reach so that you can improve your content strategy.

Conclusion

Whatever your goal for organic social media posts, it starts with organic reach.

It’s the foundation upon which other metrics stand.

Since the aim of publishing social media content is to reach as many people as possible, organic reach becomes critical.

Take the steps in this guide and track how they affect your organic reach.

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