Are You Being Wowed By Your Social Media Reach?

Or even worse your social media expert is trying to wow you by your social media reach.  What is social media reach? and why do these awesome numbers that get thrown around so easily bug me?

Social Media Reach

To most is how far their message can go once posted to the internet or to a particular social platform.  If you  have 245 likes on your Facebook Business page and total friends of your fans is 112,295.  Your potential reach is 112, 295.  Wow that is super impressive isn’t it?

Or maybe you calculate your reach by who shares something from your page.  If one of your friends share something from your page today and they have 1,621 friends, does that mean your reach is 1,621?

Or 3 people retweet your tweet and their combined followers is 25,000, whoa that is some serious reach.

Let’s look at the real numbers

If you are using social media for business you should be more concerned about conversion than reach.

Your Facebook insights say your weekly reach is 2,264, but really your real reach at most might be in the teens.  When you post something on Facebook the 1st thing that needs to happen is Facebook needs to put it on your friends news feed then the next thing that needs to happen is your friend actually needs to be on Facebook.

Your post only goes on a few news feeds to begin with and if it gets a like or a comment a few more news feeds will be populated with your post.   Who actually saw your post?  No one if they never logged into Facebook of if it never ended up on their news feed.

Let’s look at Twitter – Your post is retweeted by someone who has 7,821 followers.  The 80/20 rule says 80% of twitter users barely use Twitter.  Now you are down to 1,564, of those 1,564 how many on are twitter right now?  Let’s use 20% again which = 312.   If 1% click your link in your tweet that would be 31.  Hey 31 clicks, awesome but it is a far cry from 7,821.  Even 31 is high in my opinion.

No question social media is powerful but it’s not the silver bullet it is made out to be.

Of the 31 clicks how many reached out and introduced themselves?