Organic reach

In practice a post reaches a fraction of your followers, and whether it travels further depends on how the first people react. Networks test content on a small sample and push it on, or not, based on that behaviour. This is why the first two hours after publishing matter disproportionately, and why it pays to publish when your audience is active rather than when you have time.

Why it frustrates companies: a page with three thousand followers gathered over years now reaches a few hundred people. It is not a punishment, it is the network's business model. More useful than watching the declining curve is looking at what survives it: which topics travel on their own and which do not. The ones that travel are candidates for paid support, where you already know the content works.

How to work with it: stop treating reach as the headline number and watch saves, shares and comments instead, because those cause reach. Publish less and better, since a weak post also handicaps the start of the next one. And accept that a link off the platform reduces reach, so if you need the click it is more honest to pay for it than to try outsmarting the algorithm.

Where it gets distorted: comparing against other people's numbers. A small page naturally shows higher percentages than a large one, and a different industry has different audience behaviour, so benchmark tables tell you little. Reach on its own is not a goal either. We have seen posts with enormous reach and no commercial effect, because the people seeing them were outside the target group.

For every client we keep a simple table: topic, format, reach, reactions. After three months it is obvious what to write, and opinions stop being argued. Try it today: find your three highest reach posts from the last six months and see whether they share a topic or a format.