What Is Facebook Reach and How Is It Calculated in 2022?

Understanding performance should be an integral part of any social media marketing strategy. And what better way to start than by brushing up on key metrics? Even though Facebook is the number one social network in terms of global monthly active users, and a key focus of many brands’ digital marketing efforts, some of the platform’s metrics are not exactly straightforward.

So, what does reach mean on Facebook?

Let’s start with the very basics: definitions. According to Facebook, reach is the number of unique users who had any content from your Facebook Page or about your Page enter their screen. So, in simple terms, it’s the count of Facebook users who came into contact with your brand on Facebook. The definition alone seems straightforward. What makes matters a bit more complicated, is the fact that reach is calculated in 1-day, 7-day, and 28-day increments.

For example, if a user sees your content twice in one day and then twice the next day, and you choose to view reach in 1-day increments, the user will be counted once on day 1 and once on day 2. If you choose to view 7-day or 28-day reach, the same user will only be counted once in the 7-day and 28-day periods, respectively, regardless of the number of times they see your type of content.

What does this mean?

The exact same performance in terms of reaching Facebook users can be represented in a few different ways, depending on the timespan you take into account. Keeping this in mind when analyzing your results will help you avoid misunderstandings.

The future of Facebook reach

Since 2014, organic reach2 on Facebook has been steadily declining, mostly due to the platform’s growth and larger amounts of content that suddenly started appearing. The ad content space became more and more competitive with time, and Facebook made the practical decision to not show everyone everything there is to show. Instead, users would only see the content that Facebook’s algorithm deemed most relevant to them.

This, of course, meant that audiences of individual Pages and profiles would shrink, and the reach of organic posts would continue to decrease as well. Even more changes came in 2018, when Facebook decided to overhaul the algorithms3 that dictated what was shown in users’ feeds. In January 2018, Mark Zuckerburg wrote a post4, explaining that the company was shifting its focus towards maintaining connections between people.

Sounds great, right? For business owners trying to get through to new audiences with their marketing, not so much. One of the things that changed wasn’t reach as such, but the way reach was calculated. Up until February 2018, the reach metric took into account how many times your content has been loaded in individual news feeds. As of today, Facebook calculates reach based on how many times a post enters a person’s screen. This is supposed to make the organic reach of Pages more consistent with the way Facebook measures reach for ads.

Facebook reach is a metric often used to assess the performance of businesses on the platform, however, it’s not as straightforward as vanity or post engagement metrics. Understanding reach is a crucial step to fully understanding the effectiveness of your Facebook marketing and refining your strategy.