Also called unique reach
Reach is the number of distinct people who saw a piece of content at least once.
Reach counts humans, once each, no matter how often they saw the post. That makes it the closest available proxy for audience size in a given moment — closer than follower count, which measures accumulated history rather than current attention.
The gap between followers and reach is diagnostic. When reach sits far below follower count, it usually means the audience was acquired faster than interest was built: people followed and stopped watching. That gap widens quietly over years and is invisible if you only track followers.
Reach is also platform-bounded. Cross-platform reach cannot be added up, because the same person following you in three places counts three times.
In practice
80,000 followers and 9,000 reach on a typical post means roughly one in nine of the audience is still being served your content.
Common mistake
Summing reach across platforms for a media kit. Overlap is large among engaged fans, and the total overstates the real audience.
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