How to increase reach on social media

Reach is just one of the several key performance indicators you might want to track. In this article we’ll look at what reach is exactly, along with steps you can take to keep your reach going in the right direction.

What is reach?

On social media, reach is the total number of unique accounts that viewed your content. This differs from impressions, which is the total number of times your content was viewed, regardless of whether an account had viewed the same piece of content before.

Reach is important because without your content being seen, it’s impossible for your social media presence to grow or for your business to be discovered by new potential customers. If reach is plateauing or decreasing, this is something that needs to be seriously addressed for the sake of your business online.

Here are some techniques you can try to get your reach hitting new heights…

Increase the frequency of publishing

If your publishing schedule is infrequent or inconsistent, this can affect your reach. Think of it like this: the more pieces of content you publish, the more chances you have of being seen online. Social media channels can’t push your content to new eyeballs if you aren’t publishing content in the first place.

When it comes to content creation for social media, consistency is key, so if you aren’t consistently publishing content, that’s a good place to start. If you’re managing multiple social media channels, don’t forget that you can repackage content to suit other apps. Consider crossposting media to relevant channels. You could share short-form vertical video content to Instagram reels and TikTok. You could post photos to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and share stories posts to Instagram and Facebook. This could help you share content consistently to audiences on different social media platforms, without overextending yourself or using up excessive time and resources.

Check out how @AppleMusic shared the same piece of content to Twitter and Instagram.

Increase the quality of your content

The amount of engagement your content gets can affect its reach. This is because social media platforms are constantly trying to serve the end user with content they will look at and respond to. Taking action on a piece of content by liking, commenting, sharing or saving, feeds into the algorithm. If your content is getting engaged with, the social media platform often pushes that piece of content to more feeds.

How can you increase engagement? It starts with creating quality content that your audience will want to interact with.

Check out this video from @crumblcookies on TikTok. Not only do you know exactly what to expect from each piece of content from the cover images, when you click on a piece of content it is captivating. From high quality imagery and consistent topics, to clever editing and added music, it’s difficult to look away.

Look at your content and consider:

• How can you increase interest in your content?
• Are your cover images visually inviting, interesting or aesthetically pleasing?
• What would make someone interact with or share your content?
• Are you inviting or asking for comments, saves and shares?

Get to know your audience

When you have an audience, get to know them and what they respond to. You can do this by checking out your audience demographics on Minter.io. If you don’t know what your target audience looks like, it makes it infinitely more difficult to create content they will specifically interact with and want to share. If your audience stops looking at and interacting with your content, this affects how much of it they’ll see in their feed, so make sure you consider your audience with every piece of content you post.

Use features to reach more people

All social media apps have inbuilt ways to make your content more searchable - use them.

These include:

• Hashtags
• Location
• Tagging people
• ‘Add Yours’ Instagram stickers
• Facebook boosts / Advertising

By making it possible for your posts to show up in hashtag searches, location searches and on other people’s tagged feeds, you’re making it possible for different people to discover your content. For example, the Instagram account @nvysotskaya_photography published a post with the location tag ‘City Hall’. This shows up in a feed for the location ‘San Francisco, California’.

Interact with other accounts

Being on social media is about forming an online community. Interacting with other accounts that you enjoy or that are relevant to your business is another way to get your brand out there. Leaving genuine, considered comments on other people’s content can not only give people a good opinion of you and your brand, but it can give the account owner and viewers of the comment a reason to check out your profile. It’s a time-consuming strategy, but it’s one of the most personable and can create meaningful bonds around your brand.

If you’re looking to increase your reach on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or TikTok, check out Minter.io today! Our analytics tool provides metrics every business needs to grow online in 2022 and beyond.