When you put so much time and effort into creating amazing Instagram content, you want to make sure it gets shown to more eyes!

What is reach?

Reach is the total number of unique accounts that have seen your post or story.

An account doesn’t need to be following you in order to see your post or story, but it takes a little bit of groundwork to reach those accounts who have not yet discovered you, thus increasing your reach. 

But first, how do you check your reach? If you are looking to increase something, you need to be able to measure it, right? 

There are two different ways to do this – at an overall account level, and at individual post level.

Overall Account Reach

 First, head to your own account homepage, by tapping your profile image in the bottom right corner. Once here, tap the three-line menu in the top right corner. 

These are Instagram’s in-house analytics. 

At the top, you will see the headings “Content” “Activity” and “Audience”. Tap Activity. Scroll down a little and you will see the subheading “Reach”. 

This will show you the number of unique accounts reached in the past 7 days. You will also see if this is an increase or decrease in reach compared to the week before.

Individual Post Reach

Head to your feed/profile. Tap the post you would like to check. Just under the image, you will see the blue heading: “View Insights”. 

Tap this, and a small white bar showing a few stats, including reach, will slide up. To view a more in-depth analysis, swipe your finger upwards from that bar. 

Now you can see reach, as well as the impressions (number of times your post was viewed in total, not unique accounts) made from your hashtags. 

How do I INCREASE my reach?

Increase Your Reach Tip #1:

Use local hashtags and hashtags under 500k saturation (uses)

Local hashtags can be used in two ways. One is super simple: it’s literally just the local city your business is located in, even if you’re an online business that serves clients everywhere. I live in Gulf Breeze, FL, and almost always use #gulfbreeze, #gulfbreezefl, and surrounding cities’ tags, and it ALWAYS yields a higher reach. My best guess why is that people like to see/do business with people who are geographically close to them when possible, and usually these tags aren’t very saturated.

The second way to use local tags: Let’s say you have a business Instagram account for a hair salon based in Nashville. What are your potential clients searching for? For example #nashvillehairstylist #hairnashville #hairstylingnashville, etc.

As I mentioned above, the saturation on these is likely to already be under 500K, which is a good thing. If your hashtag is too saturated, it can become lost in the millions of other posts using that same hashtag.

How to Check Hashtag Saturation

Inside Instagram, tap on the search icon in the bottom bar. 

Type in the hashtag you want to check. This will bring up a list of hashtags, including the one you searched for, and other related hashtags. Underneath each will be its saturation number.

Example #nashvillehairstylist has 247K other posts using this hashtag. Perfect!

Increase Your Reach Tip #2:

Tell the algorithm you’re online

 Engage in your feed for five to ten minutes before posting, and make sure you reply to any comments promptly. Pick a few hashtags from what you just posted, click them, click “Recent” (not “Top”), and leave genuine comments on posts from there that catch your eye. These are users who are likely still online (hence the “Recent” tab) and are posting/interested in similar content.

Need more ideas for increased reach with engagement? Download my FREE Engagement Checklist here!

Increase Your Reach Tip #3:

Post when your audience is online.

This makes sense – people are more likely to see your content in their feed if they are online at the same time, right? But how do you know when your audience is usually on?

Head to your Instagram Insights again (via the top right three lines menu). Now, instead of tapping “Activity”, click “Audience”. Scroll to the bottom, and you will see a bar graph, with the heading “Followers”. 

You can toggle between different days to make the graph show you when the majority of your audience is online. For example, this shows that on Tuesdays, the majority of followers are online at 9pm. Depending on your audience, this can fluctuate greatly, or stay the same every day. You should check this regularly, as it can change daily.

My challenge to you: record your reach today, both at the account level and individual post, then implement these three tips for two weeks. Share the before and after results with me @mollyacahill- I’m cheering for you!