Reach is one of the criteria for successful promotion on Instagram*. It shows how many users see your posts, stories, and reels. Reach can both grow and fall, and sometimes the fall is quite sharp.

In this article, we’ll break down what is reach in Instagram*, why it’s so important to track it, what causes coverage to fall and how to get it back to its previous level.

What is reach in Instagram and why is it important

In a nutshell, reach is the accounts (users, people) who saw your content in a certain period of time. For example, a post, a story, a reel, or a promotional post. This is a more accurate measure than views or likes. If 1 person has viewed the same post 10 times, the reach will still be one, meaning we are dealing with 1 unique user. If the post’s stats show a reach of 150 and views of 197, that means 150 people have viewed the post.

Sources of reach: hashtags, recommendations (interesting), feed (homepage), geolocation, reposts, music and effects pages, profile, and other sources.

Why is reach so important?

You can use it to understand how many real users are seeing content. Reach is directly related to engagement metrics. On its own, it does not give the full picture, and should be assessed in conjunction with other indicators – subscriptions, likes, comments, sales. For example, a user can look at a publication, but take no action. Shows and visits are also uninformative without coverage. But in total they give a clearer picture – how effective promotion is, and what can be added/changed in promotion strategy.

Pay attention to the reach and the choice of bloggers to place ads. Evaluate the placement based on the intended coverage, rather than the number of subscribers.

Example: a blogger has 160 000 subscribers. And the reach of the account is only 8,000 people. This means either the blogger’s content is of low quality, or he’s got fake subscribers, likes, comments (or maybe all of them together), or something else is wrong.

Reach also lets you keep track of whether you’re missing from your Instagram feed and recommendations. For example, you can see in the stats how many of the reached accounts, are not subscribed to you. This means they most likely saw your post in recommendations or by hashtag.

What does it mean to have non-subscribers in your reach

Reach is displayed in business profile stats and in the author’s account, this information is not available to a simple account. To see the reach, click on the button with three bars in the upper right corner, open the item “Statistics” and see there 3 tabs – actions, audience, content. The reach is in the tabs “Accounts reached” and “Content you’ve published.”

How to see reach

Reached Accounts. This displays the number of people who have viewed any of your content over a selected period of time. You can see the total number of covered accounts (subscribers and non-subscribers). There is segmentation by city, country, gender, and age.
Content. Here you can see the coverage of your publications. You can see the total reach or by each specific post, reels or story. Publications can be filtered by their coverage. To do this, use the filter buttons at the top.

You can also see the stats for a particular post separately without going to the general menu. Just click on “Statistics” under the post. This is also where you can find the sources of coverage.

What a good reach should be

There is no single answer to the question “What is considered good coverage”. SMM-specialists consider the norm values of 30% -60% of the total number of subscribers. Involvement is better to count separately for each post by the formula:

ER = (likes + comments) / subscribers * 100%.

If you want to count ER for the whole account then sum up ER for all posts and divide by their total number.

Example: you have 50,000 subscribers. A good coverage rate for the account in this case is between 15,000 and 30,000 people. Let’s say the last post got 1,500 likes and 500 comments. The engagement of such a post is (1 500 + 500) / 50 000 * 100% = 4%.

What does the reach of the post/reel/story depend on

Basically coverage depends on:

• time of publication;
• quality of publication;;
• the speed of the set of interactions;
• Direct mail correspondence – the more messages you get and the more responses you get, the higher your reach;
• the number of reposts in your posts, which is especially important for the Rls.

Reach has fallen sharply on Instagram – what’s wrong?

What’s causing the drop in coverage? Most often there are objective reasons – the post lost relevance, the quality of the content decreased, you chose the wrong time to publish, you abandoned your account and much more. Each case is different.

The main reasons:

• Scamming and mass activity – scammed followers, bought comments and likes – all this Instagram * very much dislikes. Moreover, bots themselves will not show any activity, and this will certainly affect the overall statistics. In addition to the recruitment, you should not be too keen on mass liking and massfolloving, and it’s not important whether you do it manually or through a program. The likelihood that Instagram will cut the coverage, and then block the account – is very high.
• Low quality audience. Periodically remove inactive users, bots and other trash from your subscribers – they spoil the statistics.
• Hashtags are popular hashtags in all posts. They no longer work for promotion, but it is very easy to cut off coverage because of them. The number of tags also does not help, rather the opposite – the algorithm can take a sheet of tags as spam. Especially if you repeat the same tags in several posts in a row.

   

• Third-party services – officially all services are banned, except those where there is authorization through Instagram itself. The “bad” services ask you to enter your username and password from your account.
  Participation in gives and contests, where there is no your target audience, but only freeloaders. They might subscribe and be interested in one post, and then never log into your account.

   

• Content – does not cause a response, not interested in subscribers. So you need to work on improving its quality.

   

• Complaints about the account – you might have posted someone else’s photo, violated copyright, posted offensive content, brand photos, and so on. Someone complained about the post and the coverage went down.

   

• Shadow ban – in this case, coverage falls hard and unexpectedly. Instagram literally cuts shows, you stop showing up in the feed, and the publications can’t be found by hashtags. Coverage monitoring is just one of the ways to suspect you’re getting into a shadow ban.

  You can check if your account is under sanctions by going to “Settings – Account – Account Status. You should see two green check marks indicating that your profile is fine and not banned.

How to get your Instagram* reach back to previous level

• Stop all activity for 48 hours. Suspend all means of promoting the account.
• Remove all hashtags from your last 10-20 posts. Make 2-3 publications without hashtags.
• Remove inactive users, bots and other trash from your subscribers – they spoil statistics.
• Don’t edit your publications too often – prepare pictures and texts of your posts in advance.
• Make sure you don’t have forbidden content, which may result in complaints. If you do – delete it.
• Be careful with automated services, especially those requiring a login and password.
• Find the perfect time to publish – analyze your statistics to see what times your audience is most active.
• Create quality, engaging content. Motivate subscribers to take action – for example, “We’ll shoot a follow-up if the post gets 10,000 likes.
• Keep in touch with them, for example, by inviting them to ask questions in the comments, shooting a video or photo response to the most interesting ones, organizing polls and so on – this will increase people’s activity.
• Keep an eye out for new features on Instagram and use them on your account.

Conclusion

Reach is one of the most important indicators of a quality Instagram* account, so you should always keep an eye on it and avoid drastic drops. If you notice a drop in coverage, do not panic and do not make hasty decisions. Carefully analyze everything, find and eliminate the causes