As a marketer, you can post on your social media all you want and when you want. But if your social marketing strategy is not in place and doesn’t align with your overall marketing strategy, all your efforts will probably go in vain.

Creating a successful social media marketing strategy takes time—no marketer can go right with social media in the first go. That said, time isn’t the only factor. Data plays a more important role here. This data includes how your past social media content performed, how people interacted with your brand online, and most importantly, how many people your content reached.

While you can easily figure out how your content performs and how people interact with it through likes and comments, you may not get to know how many people view it (social media reach). Platforms like Instagram and Facebook give insights into the reach through impressions, clickthroughs, and engagement rate but what about platforms like LinkedIn—the most effective platform for promoting your B2B brand?

In this article, let’s discuss the importance of calculating the potential social media reach on each social network.

Importance of Calculating Social Media Reach

Do you know 90% of companies are not fully reaching their social reach potential?

There are mainly 3 types of social media reach – 1) Organic reach, which counts the visitors that find your content by following your page. 2) Paid reach, which comes from the views you get through paid content like ads, boosting posts, boosting page following. 3) Viral reach, the reach gained by your followers reaching their networks.

Type 2, ads, have an easier way to calculate potential social reach. When you create an ad, the social platform will tell you how many people will be reached based on the filters and the ad spend. However, it is important to calculate such potential reach for organic posts as well. The main reasons are,

1. Helps set realistic goals: By understanding the potential reach of your social media content, you can set realistic goals for your social media marketing campaigns. This can help track progress and adjust strategies accordingly.

2. Maximizes ROI: By identifying the potential reach of social media content, you can optimize content to ensure maximum ROI (Return on Investment). This can help get the most out of their social media marketing budgets.

3. Provides insights into content performance: Analyzing potential organic reach can also provide insights into the performance of previous content. You can use this information to optimize their content and improve their overall social media marketing strategies.

Several factors affect social media reach, such as the time you chose to post online, the type of content, its length, and more. About the type of content you have, deciding on what time of the day, week, month, or year you post seriously impacts your reach. The content itself plays a massive role in developing your social media presence. Interesting and captivating content will always perform better.

Another factor that impacts social media reach is how easily users can find your advertised product through simple keywords.

Companies adopt several different marketing channels like websites, emails, phone calls, and even social media platforms to gauge buyer intent and get a clear idea of the market.

How to Calculate Social Reach

Post Type 1 – Organic Reach: Social media reach is calculated on the basis of the number of followers, fans, subscribers, connections, or visibility a company has. These factors are meant to give you an accurate estimation of what part of an audience regularly sees the content you post on particular social media platforms.

Post Type 2 – Paid Reach) Social platforms provide this at the time of placing ads

Post Type 3 – Viral Reach) Is always the hardest to both build and to calculate. Most companies are missing this potential to reach through their own employee networks. This is both a missed opportunity and missed data in your ROI calculations.

While marketers are always under pressure to show higher ROIs, including such viral reach is critical. This provides the full 360 data for your overall social media efforts.

If you are wondering how to calculate such viral social media reach, all you need to do is use the social media reach calculator available that comes with social media amplification tools such as MarketBeam. MarketBeam is a social media amplification tool that allows companies to leverage their employees’ social media to boost their online reach.

In essence, MarketBeam expands a business’s social reach by enabling it to use its employees’ social media network to promote its brand and generate leads. Since each employee brings a unique set of people to the table, a business can expand its reach to even those people that might not necessarily be in the target demographic.

MarketBeam

MarketBeam is a social media advocacy and employee amplification platform that has been specially designed to help businesses bridge the gap between their marketing efforts and their desired results. At MarketBeam, we understand that the only way to achieve this is to unleash the full power of the workforce and everything that they bring to the table.

MarketBeam, given its involvement with social media publishing and monitoring, understands the value that employee networks hold and works to integrate each of the employee’s networks into the social media marketing strategy of a company so that it can make the most use of its employees’ connections.

MarketBeam, as an employee advocacy platform, uses the networks that each employee creates for themselves on social media over their careers. This platform essentially makes employees social advocates for the company they work for and uses each of their diverse following to spread the word about the company’s brand, product, or service. This automated service performs all the data analytics for the company and optimizes its marketing to a whole new level.