The Decrease In Reach Across All Social Media Platforms 2023

In the evolving digital landscape, social media has emerged as a dominant platform for businesses to connect with their audience and boost brand visibility. However, recent data indicates an interesting trend – a gradual decline in social media reach across all major platforms. In this blog post, we’ll discuss what reach is and the decrease in each social media platform.

What is Reach?

Social media reach is the number of unique viewers who have seen your content (Reach will consider three views from the same individual as one, rather than counting each view as a unique view.). Unlike followers or impressions, the metric gives you an accurate count of viewers who has seen your content. This allows you to estimate the size of your real audience.

Reach can provide useful information, such as the real number of active followers, the impact of your partnerships with influencers and other brands, and the interest generated around your online events. Reach allows users to monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns in real-time. This feature enables them to make timely adjustments before it’s too late.

When evaluating the performance of your content, reach provides a more accurate representation compared to other metrics like impressions. This is because reach only considers each individual once, regardless of the number of times they have viewed your content.

Instagram and Facebook Reach

Both social media platforms owned by Meta have seen a steady decrease in reach over the last 3 years, and it seems this trend will continue for a while.

There are several possible reasons contributing to this decline, such as the saturation of content on these platforms, overwhelming amount of posts, updates, and ads, users may have less time to use social media platforms due to their personal lives and the shift in user demographics and preferences.

Despite these challenges, Meta is continually working on strategies to improve organic reach on its platforms, such as developing targeted content strategies and enhancing user engagement.

When comparing the two, numerous social media studies have highlighted Instagram’s superior performance over Facebook in recent years. Instagram has shown to be the better choice for marketing purposes, with healthier reach, engagement, and other key performance indicators (KPIs).

According to recent data, in 2023, Instagram’s average reach engagement is 4.20%, whereas Facebook only reaches a maximum average of 1.90%. Also, in 2021, Instagram had an average reach rate of 13.90%, while Facebook’s average reach rate was only 6.53%. Unfortunately, as seen in the graph below, Instagram and Facebook reach has decreased yearly without no signs of stopping.

It’s worth noting that Instagram consistently boasts higher engagement rates than Facebook. Regardless of how marketers analyse engagement, Instagram should be their top choice when selecting between the two platforms.