“Social media is here. It’s not going away; not a passing fad. Be where your customers are: in social media.”
-- Lori Ruff

To see if your marketing strategy is working, it’s useful to study your Insights’ Reach tab. While Likes are about the clicks, Reach is about the number of people who have seen your posts.

This section shows how well your content reaches your target audience. If you are spending time and money posting new content and using Facebook advertising to draw in new followers, then you’d better make sure your content is getting seen by people.

For instance, if a photo album from your trip to Bolivia is reaching only 50 people, while your video from Bolivia is reaching 800, it’s clear what you should focus on. Spend more time creating engaging videos and post them more regularly, but don’t stop posting photos altogether. It’s always good to have a balance.

Under your Insight’s Reach section, you’ll find five diagrams that will give you a good idea of your posts’ performances.

Post Reach

Post Reach is the total number of unique users — both followers of your page and non-followers — who have seen your posts. If someone sees your post multiple times, this is only counted as once for the purpose of reach. When you see your reach going up or down, have a look at your content to understand why you got more engagement with one post over another.

In this graph, you’ll see two sets of data: the lighter orange region indicating your organic post reach and the darker orange part showing your paid post reach. Paid post reach illustrates the reach from promoted posts boosted through Facebook advertising.

From the graph below, I can see that my highest post organic reach occurred on January 10, 2018. Hovering over it will show the post reach for that day and clicking on it will produce a pop-up box that shows the posts you shared that day.

On 10 January, I shared an announcement of a tour I was running to Tajikistan, which reached 5,308 people and resulted in 409 post clicks. On top of that, I also shared a popular blog post of mine, which reached a few more hundreds.

By clicking on the post details, I get to dig a little deeper and find out more information like what type of reaction it generated, how many people hid it, etc. I will elaborate in the next lesson on what kind of reactions to look out for. This gives me an idea of what kind of content resonates most with my audience and it helps me choose the type of content to share in the future.

Reactions, Comments, and Shares

As I’ve said many times, engagement is key to building an audience on Facebook. Make sure you check this section of your Insights regularly to see if your content is resonating with your audience.

The "Reactions, Comments and Shares" graph tells you the positive engagement that your posts have received. The purple line graph indicates the reactions (like, love, etc.), the light pink shows the number of comments, while the maroon one tells you the number of shares.

Similarly, clicking on a particular day will show you the posts you shared on that day.

In the example below, my Page received the highest engagement on December 31, 2017. A quick look at the posts I shared on that day shows that the most engaging post was a photo — a clear indication of what I should be focusing on moving forward.

Reactions, comments, and shares are directly tied to engagement; increasing these will help you gain additional reach through the page suggestions, mentioned above.

Reactions

The third graph shows the different reactions your posts have received over the preferred period. The reactions include like, love, wow, haha, sad, and angry. I don’t think this graph is of much use. As long as most of your posts have generated positive reactions, you should be on the right track. The graph would have been more useful if it allowed you to see which posts generated which reactions.

Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes

The next chart shows adverse reactions from your audience and which posts triggered people to move away from your page.

As seen from the screenshot, the same post that received the highest reach on May 21 was also hidden by five people. Luckily, it didn’t cause them to unlike my Page. Having posts be hidden doesn’t matter as much as having people unlike my Page.

However, people marking your content as spam is something you need to watch. This is not a big issue if it only happens occasionally, but if it's going on regularly, you may be penalized by Facebook.

Total Reach

Total Reach refers to your post reach, plus the reach of any content that was posted to your Page and shown to your fans, Page-like ads displayed to people, mentions, and check-ins.

The total reach is divided into organic vs. paid reach, with the darker orange region showing your Page reach boosted using Facebook advertising.