Instagram reach: what it is and how to increase it
Instagram reach:
what it is and
how to increase it
6 min read
Do you understand what reach means in Instagram statistics? How is reach different from impressions? Why can Instagram reach fall and how to increase it?
Gone are the days when the struggle was for followers, the time has come for a struggle for reach. The more you increase your coverage on Instagram, the more fans or potential buyers on your page.
Contents
1. What is the difference between reach and impressions
2. How to find Instagram reach?
3. Why is this indicator so important and what does it depend on?
4. How to increase Instagram reach
The difference between reach and Instagram impressions
First, let’s figure out what Instagram reach means for statistics and how it differs from impressions.
Reach is the actual number of people who saw certain information in your account. This can be a post, a story, the account itself, or an advertisement. It takes into account only unique visitors, therefore repeated actions of the same person will not be counted.
Impressions is the number of views of your post / stories / account. On social networks, the same post can be viewed several times, the profile can be visited several times, and the history can also be viewed several times.
For example, if one person saw your post three times, this will count as 1 reach and 3 impressions. There are always more Impressions than reach.
How to see Instagram reach
You can view account reach in the internal Instagram statistics for the last 7 days. If you need a longer period, add a monitoring account in LiveDune .
Add your account to LiveDune, check your reach and help your social media grow
The screenshot was taken on June 2. We can see statistics for the week from May 26 to June 1. During this period, the account has covered 603 users, which is 97 users less than the previous week (May 19 – May 25).
Statistics are available only for business accounts. A step-by-step guide will help you switch to a business account if you haven’t already.
Post reach can be found in the statistics of the post itself. It is available for the entire time since the publication of the post:
Instagram story reach is available as long as the story is active, that is, 24 hours. Analyse it while it is active or track it in LiveDune . In stories, the “Spectators” indicator can be used as reach. The essence is the same; they simply call it differently.
In this case, there were 67 impressions and 56 spectators. That is, 56 people in total watched History 67 times.
Why is this indicator so important?
In 2018, marketers began to use reach to count engagement followers (Engagement Rate Reach). If previous engagement (ER) was counted from followers, now it is more accurate to count it from the average reach of posts. And this is true, because some followers are no longer active for a long time, and some do not see your posts due to algorithmic feeds in social networks. So why consider engagement from these followers? It is much more logical to consider precisely those who see your posts.
The reach can be judged from the quality of the post. If after posting in post statistics you see a reach indicator above the average for your account, you can be proud of yourself – the post is good.
It is considered optimal if the coverage of the post is 15% -30% of the total number of followers. Typically, under such a publication appears the inscription: “This post is doing better than 95% of your recent post. Promote it to reach a wider audience. View insights. “
Whether or not to promote your business is your choice, but if you decide to promote, 50% of the work is already done. All that remains is to properly set up the audience that your post will be interesting for. The reach indicator is also useful when evaluating the quality of a targeted ad. If you had a lot of coverage, but few or no conversions (to followers) at all, it serves as a hint to check the structure and quality of the ad.
What does Instagram reach depend on?
Why are your publications gaining a little coverage if there are live followers, who in theory should see everything that you publish? Clever feed algorithms are to blame. The more often a follower interacts with your content (likes, comments, watches videos, stories, writes to Direct messages, writes answers to stories, views account, etc.), the higher you are in their feed. If the follower does not see your posts, then they are not interested in your content.
Officially, Instagram describes only three criteria for the formation of a smart feed:
But there are still many questions from various Instagram gurus:
Using all Instagram formats (photos, videos, carousel, stories, live broadcasts) helps to rise in the feed of your followers. This is most clearly seen if you start using the new post format. It is logical to assume that in this way social networks popularize their innovations. Instagram does not yet have data on how followers interact with the new format of your posts. Therefore, it shows such posts with priority so that there is more reach and there is an opportunity to collect data on the interaction of followers with this format for further analysis. Try to publish different content in any case, to understand how your audience reacts to it.
Like speed. They say how many interactions your post gains within an hour after publication is very important, but even more importantly in the first 20 minutes. Based on this, Instagram decides on the quality / usefulness of your post and, as a result, whether to raise it in the feeds of other followers or not. It sounds fairly unlikely: how did we come to this conclusion? There is no solid proof yet.
The reaction of followers to your stories. The more followers actively watch all your stories, the greater the reach of the stories themselves and the posts in the feed. It makes sense if you use the stories to send followers to your new post, i.e. use stories for announcements.
There are a lot of different hypotheses about this that have no practical evidence. Therefore, we advise you not to believe others words, but to formulate your own hypotheses and practice them by implementing these tips.
Use LiveDune to monitor your account’s
reach and get the statistics
LiveDune reach
All statistics on the reach of your account are collected in LiveDune on the “reach” tab, only reach through Stories is on a separate tab.
The most useful for you will be the top posts for reach (“Summary” tab), as with its help you can draw conclusions which posts get more coverage than others. Try to determine what unites these posts, and publish new ones.
You can see the total reach by day, week, and month. It is worth paying attention to peaks, for example, on the chart below — April 13, there was a peak in the number of account views, but the coverage was the same. If you have the same anomalies, then try to figure out the reasons and use the information received in the future to improve your statistics. In this case, it most likely was the publication of a large number of Stories at once.
The informative graph below shows the dynamics of reach / views on posts. It’s worth looking at the line, as it shows the average reach / views on posts. If it goes down, then the coverage falls, and you need to take measures for rejuvenating your account.
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Answers on most common questions
Why is seven-day reach more than weekly reach?These metrics are difficult to compare, because the account reach for past dates does not change because new users are counted in the day’s metric. But the sum of the reach of posts published over the past date may increase due to new users.
“Day D” can be replaced with any time period.
