Posted on
11/1/2022

Reach, the key KPI for your Influencer Marketing campaigns

Among the various KPIs that can be analysed in the context of an Influencer Marketing campaign, reach occupies an important place. A central measure, reach provides valuable information about the health of an account. Reach on social networks is a good measure to evaluate the success of individual publications as well as the performance of Influencer Marketing campaigns. We explain why reach is a goldmine that should not be overlooked when analysing your campaigns!

pawns arranged on a map
pawns arranged on a map

What is "reach"?

Reach is the number of unique users who have seen your publication. It can take different forms, there are generally three: organic reach, paid reach and viral reach. These different types of “reach” correspond to the way in which the content has been presented to the Internet user.

  • Organic reach: organic reach corresponds to all the people who have seen your publication without it having been promoted. This is your natural reach, which tends to decrease over time,
  • Paid reach: paid reach is the number of views resulting from promotions you have set up to boost your visibility and reach more people,
  • Viral reach: viral reach is the number of visitors who have seen your content as a result of interaction and sharing by other users.

Reach VS impressions: what are the differences?

If there are two measures that are often confused in social media, it is undoubtedly reach and impressions. Especially since these terms are not always presented in the same way on the different social networks. We’ll explain their differences and how to avoid making the same mistake.

Generally speaking, reach is the number of people who have seen your publication. Impressions, on the other hand, correspond to the number of times a publication has been seen. For example, when you run an ad campaign on Facebook, a single user might see your post three times in their News Feed during the campaign. This will count as three impressions while the reach will remain as one person.

It is also important to note that neither reach nor impressions indicate that anyone actually clicked on your ad, it simply means that it was seen. Furthermore, there are specificities for each social network regarding reach and impressions. Indeed, while for Facebook and Instagram, the number of impressions corresponds to the number of times a publication is highlighted, for Twitter impressions correspond to the number of views of a tweet. Twitter does not distinguish between reach and impressions, or rather it only gives you access to the number of impressions of your tweets.

Moreover, reach and impressions are data available in the statistics tab of each account but are not otherwise visible. Thanks to the Kolsquare solution, you can know the reach of the influencers you are targeting, but also learn more about their audiences to be sure that your message is being conveyed to the right people. You can also know the real cumulative reach of your campaigns broadcast by different KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders).

Why is reach so important today?

Before algorithms took over social networks, posts were displayed in chronological order. So if you had 10,000 followers, your reach could be 10,000 people, but today things work differently and reach has drastically decreased as competition has grown. Analysing your reach has become essential to understand and analyse the success of your publications and Influencer Marketing campaigns.

Indeed, thanks to it, you can measure the success of individual campaigns between the different content creators you may have engaged. It also allows you to identify the “health of an account”, the higher the reach, the more active and engaged a person’s followers are with the content. It also allows you to compare the impact of partnerships with influencers, to identify and measure the interest of your audience for your product launches or events, or to compare the weight of your different social networks. An essential tool to understand and master.

How can you improve your reach and expand your audience?

Now that we have seen what reach is and what the differences are between reach and impressions, you may be wondering how you can increase your reach to reach a wider audience and find new customers.

It is important to know that there are different factors that influence your reach and that you can easily take into account to increase it:

The relevance of your content

No matter how many of the following techniques you implement, your reach will only increase if your content is relevant, inspiring, or entertaining. Whatever your niche, it is essential that your content meets the expectations of your audience if you want to increase your reach.

Time of day

If you publish at off-peak times, chances are your content will be seen by very few people. It is often advised to post at times when your audience is most active so that you can be seen by as many people as possible. However, this also means posting at the most competitive times, so another strategy is to post at less competitive times. Experiment to see what works best for you, but one thing is for sure: the time of day you post will affect your reach no matter when you choose. It’s up to you to see what strategy you want to implement.

Use trends

Surf the news, don’t be afraid to take the trends that are working and put your own spin on them, and take advantage of a higher reach to be discovered by new people.

Use new features

Instagram is constantly launching new features to counter the competition from TikTok. Use Reels to improve your reach, take the time to choose the “trendy” sounds of the moment to be more highlighted. Don’t hesitate to use Collabs, which allow you to reach both your audience and that of the person with whom you are co-creating the publication. It’s a great opportunity to reach new people and introduce you to a larger number of internet users who may become new customers.

Interact with your audience

Use “call to actions” to encourage your community to respond and interact with you. Today, all algorithms use the interaction rate to determine whether a publication is liked or not, which is why it is important to engage with your audience through your publications.

Reach, but not only…

Of course, reach is one of the most important data to follow when launching an Influencer Marketing campaign. It allows you to know how many people have been exposed, but it’s not everything. Other metrics remain essential to observe when collaborating with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). These include:

  • The engagement rate: it is no longer presented, the engagement rate, which measures the interactions of Internet users with a publication, remains one of the most important measures today. It can also be interesting to measure your engagement rate on your reach in order to know how many people who have seen your publication have reacted.
  • Share of Voice: Share of voice is like a market share for online presence. It measures the number of people who interact with your brand versus the number of people who interact with your competitors.
  • Response or click-through rate: when a story is shared, it is interesting to know exactly how many people have seen it, but it is also necessary to see if the message is being sent to the right people in the right way. This can be seen in the response rate or the click-through rate when a link has been shared.
  • Mentions: when a user spontaneously mentions your company organically, this can indicate good awareness and even brand loyalty. Mentions allow you to reach another panel of users outside your own audience and therefore increase your reach indirectly. Mentions are therefore a good tool to increase your reach outside your circle of influence.

As mentioned earlier, not all of this data is directly visible on social networks. In fact, they are only accessible in the “statistics” tab of the account owner. This is why it can be interesting for brands to turn to an Influencer Marketing technology solution such as Kolsquare to collect all this data and be able to compare it from one account to another in order to carefully select the most performing KOLs for your next campaigns. Want to know more about your next Influencer projects? Don’t hesitate to contact our dedicated experts now.

About Kolsquare

Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of  KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.

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