Reach

The indicator measures how many social media users saw the content you communicated. It helps you determine the actual reach of your social media campaign. It can also be used to understand which content your audience finds interesting. Remember that people were ‘reached’ does not automatically mean that they interacted with the communicated content - other indicators cover engagement. Reach is not measured by all social media platforms.

Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:

1) Decide what social media content you want to measure. Are you interested in the reach of all the posts on all the social media used during your campaign? Or a specific selection only?

2) Use an online search engine to find the most up-to-date, official guidance on how to count the reach on your chosen social media platform(s). Follow the provided guidance to calculate the reach of the content you are interested in.

3) To determine the indicator’s value, sum up the reach of the communicated content.

Disaggregate the data by social media channels, gender, and other factors relevant to the focus of your social media campaign.

1) If you use several social media channels, it is likely that there will be some overlap in the reach achieved by each channel, which will result in double counting the people you reached. For example, among 200,000 people reached on one social media channel, many will also be reached by other channels. Unless your campaign can quantify the overlap (e.g. by surveying the target audience members), the best thing you can do is to 1) acknowledge that there might be an overlap; and 2) report on the reach achieved by the individual channels in addition to reporting the total reach.

2) Some posts might have a higher reach than others. Does it mean that you should use more of them? Not necessarily – people might give them more attention because of how they’re designed or because they are funny, but they might not do well in getting people to click on your links or follow your content (which is what you are likely to be interested in the most). Always use this indicator in conjunction with indicators that measure active engagement, such as “shares”, “clicks” and “comments”.