Reach
Reach is the number of unique accounts that saw a piece of content, counted once per account regardless of how many impressions they generated.
Reach is the count of unique accounts that saw your content. If one viewer scrolls past your post three times, that is three impressions but a reach of one.
Reach is the cleaner measure of audience size for a single post or campaign. A post with 10,000 impressions and 2,000 reach saw each viewer five times on average — useful for brand recall but not for evaluating discovery. A post with 10,000 impressions and 9,500 reach found mostly new eyeballs, which is the signal platforms' algorithms reward with more distribution.
On Instagram and Facebook, reach is broken down into followers vs non-followers — a high non-follower reach indicates the post broke out of your base audience, which is the precondition for compound growth.
What is reach?
Reach is the number of unique accounts that saw a piece of content, counted once per account regardless of how many impressions they generated.
Related terms
Impressions
An impression is counted every time a piece of content is rendered on a viewer's screen, regardless of whether they engage with it.
Engagement rate
Engagement rate is the percentage of viewers or followers who interact with a post, calculated as interactions divided by reach, impressions, or followers.
Organic growth
Organic growth is audience growth earned through unpaid distribution — recommendation feeds, search, hashtags, and shares.