Short-form metrics & strategy
Reach: definition and examples
What is Reach?
Reach is the number of unique individuals who see a piece of content, counting each person only once no matter how many times they encounter it. It differs from impressions, which count every display including repeat views by the same person.
When you'd use it
- 1When you need to understand how many distinct people saw a video.
- 2When reporting the size of the audience a campaign actually touched.
- 3When comparing the audience size of an organic post against a paid promotion.
- 4When evaluating whether a new posting time expanded the unique viewer pool.
- 5When tracking audience growth month over month across a content calendar.
Example
A brand with 40,000 followers posted a product announcement that reached 12,000 unique accounts organically, a 30 percent reach rate. After boosting the same post with a small paid budget, total reach climbed to 58,000, with the incremental 46,000 coming from non-followers.
Use cases
- 1Reporting how many unique viewers a product launch video reached in its first week.
- 2Comparing reach across platforms to determine where a single video attracted the most distinct viewers.
- 3Measuring reach on a collaboration post to assess how much of a partner's audience the content accessed.
FAQ
What is the difference between reach and impressions?
Reach counts each person once, regardless of how many times they saw the content. Impressions count every display, including multiple views by the same person. For a video that was watched twice by the same viewer, that is two impressions but one unit of reach.
Make on-brand short-form video from the footage you already have.