Facebook Page Reach Vs Post Reach

Facebook is always rolling out new features in an effort to give users a more seamless and user-friendly experience. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work in your favor when it comes to reaching as many people as possible with your page content.

Facebook reach is the number of unique people who saw your content. It affects every other metric you can track: engagement, likes, comments, clicks and negative feedback. And that’s not all. There are different kinds of reach: post, page, organic, viral and paid. Everything on Facebook boils down to reach.

Post reach and page reach, for example, are different and have different weight.

• Post reach is the number of people who saw a specific post in their news feed.
• Page reach is the number of people who saw any of your post content during a given period of time (daily, weekly or monthly).

These two reach metrics can be deceiving or confusing. If you don’t post very often, you may have a very high post reach, but low pages reach. If you post often (e.g., five times a day or more) you may have a low post reach, but a pretty high page reach.

Which one should you focus on? Ask yourself whether you want to have individual posts seen by the most fans or make sure your brand gets in front of your fans on a regular basis. Your answer determines which form of reach—post or page—is more important to you.

Post and page reach both have three main subcategories: organic, viral and paid reach.

1. Organic reach is the reach Facebook gives you for free. It happens in the news feed when your fans see your updates. There are other possibilities, such as random users visiting your page, but these are insignificant compared to news feed views by fans.
2. Viral reach consists of the people who see your content because someone else created a story about it. For example, if a fan likes, comments or shares your post, their friends will see your post even if they aren’t fans of your page. The same is true if you’ve paid to reach larger audiences who may or may not already be your fans. If one of those targeted people creates a story, their friends will see it as well. Both are viral reach.
3. Paid reach is a subset of post reach and is pretty easy to track and report. You paid for it, so you know where it came from. If you pay to promote your posts, your post reach is going to be much bigger than your standard organic reach (because you’ve paid to reach more of your fans).”

h/t to socialmediaexaminer.com for the info!