Reach on Facebook might seem straightforward. We’ve all heard about it and we talk about it almost every day. But here at Sotrender. we still receive regular questions about Facebook Reach. Is it different from views? How so? What are the different types of reach? How are they measured?
In order to clear any doubts you still might have, we’ve gathered all the information you need to know below.
Reach and views
Let’s start by explaining what reach is, what views are, and the difference between the two.
Reach represents the number of people who have seen any post published by a Facebook Page. Reach only counts the number of unique users – each person only once. That means that even if the same person saw your post four times, it will still count only once.
It doesn’t matter whether the user saw the content on their phone, tablet, or computer. You can also split reach up into other categories, which we will explain shortly:
- Paid reach
- Organic or viral reach
The main difference between reach and views is straightforward: the number of views represents how many times each piece of content was actually seen. The total number of views includes every single time a piece of content was viewed.
In short, it doesn’t matter if a single person has seen it 1 time, 3 times or 12 times. Each time they saw it counts as a view.
Another metric is impressions. Impressions represent the number of Page views from both Facebook users (users who are logged in) and users who are not logged in or don’t have a Facebook account at all.
Types of reach
Organic reach – the number of Page and post views published by a Page without paid (promotional) activities.
Paid reach – the number of Page and post views which are a result of paid activities (ads).
Viral reach – the number of Page and post views which are a result of other user activities (e.g. sharing).
Note: Information about viral reach is available only within the Sotrender tool; you won’t find this metric in Facebook Insights, for example.
You get viral reach when a post receives thousands of likes, comments, and (typically) shares on Facebook. Or, to put it simply, when Facebook users engage with it a lot.
A piece of content which has gone viral could have gained results as seen below:
Example of viral reach on Facebook
Total reach refers to either a Page or to a single post.
- Page total reach – the number of unique users who have seen any content published by a Page in a specific period of time, regardless of the place where he/she saw it.
- Post total reach – the number of unique users who have seen a post.
Total reach (for a Page or for a single post) includes both paid and organic reach.
Information about total reach is available only for selected periods: 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, and 28 days (max. 1 month). For other periods, the given reach will always refer to average daily reach. That is because it’s not possible to know the exact amount of total reach for periods longer than one month, e.g. for a quarter or for a year.
It’s also important to know that reach includes dark posts – content that functions as an ad but is not available from the Facebook Page as a standard post.
Still, for many marketers, the total number of fans is thought to be equal to the amount of reach a published post gains. Unfortunately, with all the current changes being made within Facebook, this assumption is completely wrong. That’s because posts will never be seen by all of a Page’s fans. That’s why the number of fans is currently very weakly connected to the actual reach your posts have.
How are unique users measured?
Let’s go back to reach and unique users for a moment. How are they measured?
Let’s take a look through two examples:
- A Facebook user sees a post 2 times in a week – on Monday and on Friday. He will be counted towards the average daily reach for Monday and the average daily reach for Friday. But in the total reach for the whole week, he will be counted only once.
- A similar situation arises when a Facebook user sees a post organically and then sees the same post but as an ad. He will be counted as a unique user once in organic reach and once in paid reach. But he will be only be counted once in total reach.
That’s why, unique users taken into consideration, it is not possible to sum up, for example, organic and paid reach to get total reach. You also can’t sum daily reach to get weekly reach or multiply daily reach, e.g. by a number of days in a month, to get total monthly reach.
Want to read more definitions? Explanation of all the metrics and definitions we use in our reports and the Sotrender tool can be found in our glossary.
