Facebook marketing is a rapidly growing trend in today’s business world. Yet very few of us understand the concept of Facebook reach, how it works and what effect it can have on the visibility of our page. For leveraging Facebook features to increase the visibility of your pages, you need to understand this concept completely.

Facebook is constantly innovating and upgrading its features to provide its users with a flawless and practical experience. But these upgrades are not always in the favor of page owners in terms of reaching out to maximum number of people. Facebook reach actually is the number of people who see your posts. It can have a huge impact on all other metrics for success of your page including likes, comments, feedback etc. Post reach is the number of individuals who saw a particular post in their newsfeed and page reach is the total number of people who saw any of your page content in a given time period.

Post and page reach have three types:

Organic Reach

It is the free reach you get through Facebook: the appearance of your posts in the newsfeeds of your fans.

Viral Reach

Viral reach is what you get when someone creates a story about your post and it shows in the newsfeeds of their friends. It means that if a fan likes, comments or shares your post their friends will be able to see it regardless of the fact that they have liked your page or not. Similarly if you have paid Facebook for wider reach and one of your target audiences creates a story about your posts it will be part of viral reach.

Paid Reach

It is a subset of post reach and is obtained by paying Facebook. Paying for reach makes your ‘post reach’ higher than the ‘organic reach’.

The real problem now is that Facebook gives you a combined graph for all organic, viral and paid reach. So every time you observe your reach graph, the reach from paid ads is included. And when the ad expires the reach might go down significantly causing you to panic. Another tricky metric involved in your page reach is the friend list of your fans. A page with 5 fans having 30 people in their friend list would have a reach much less than a page with 2 fans with 1000 friends each.

Improving the facebook reach of your page requires some dedicated efforts. While you are at it, do not forget that you can Buy Facebook Likes and get paid reach, but only engagement would determine the true success of your marketing strategy.