Types of coverage
There are several types of coverage on social networks. Each has its own characteristics and features.
Organic/natural reach
These are only subscribers of channels and pages who saw this or that publication. The results depend on the size of the audience. Let's give an example to make it clearer:
- Community on VKontakte with 100 thousand subscribers.
- The recording was seen by 10 thousand people.
- Of these, only 8 thousand are subscribers. This figure will be the organic reach.
- 2 thousand belong to viral.
Organic reach shows how popular communities and pages are and what audience engagement is. A public page is more likely to use promotions if its organic reach is small relative to the number of subscribers. This indicator is worth studying before entering into an agreement with an advertising platform.
Paid/Advertising Reach
Impressions that were achieved through advertising investments. Usually, for this they buy space on advertising platforms, or post posts with targeted advertising.
Viral reach
This is the name given to users who saw a post, although they are not subscribers to the community. For example, when a user shares a post on his page, his friends and followers see it. This is how additional views appear.
If something changed in your particular VKontakte community in April (for better or worse), this is not forever. Developers are constantly updating and improving algorithms. The VKontakte team answered burning questions about coverage and more.
What changed?
Let's first understand what viral reach . It mainly consists of:
— views of posts by users who are not members of the community. They can see a repost of the post or the original if the post was liked or commented on by their friends (then the post will appear in the smart feed);
— views from the “Recommendations” section.
Viral coverage from the smart feed, including those gained through reposts, has not changed . Recent updates have affected only the last item - the “Recommendations” section. Fluctuations in viral reach may primarily affect those authors who write on popular and competitive topics.
Did you do tests before updating the partition?
All changes are always tested over a long period of time and on different groups of users. Only when a reliable result is obtained in the test and benefits for users or authors are visible, then an update occurs. Based on the results of preliminary tests, we expect an increase in comments and comments in the “Recommendations”, as well as an increase in subscribers among authors.
What to do with the involvement in thematic publics (cooking, interior design, healthy lifestyle), which cannot be compared with the involvement in entertainment communities?
We make sure to take into account the topic of the community. Our algorithms compare engagement in a culinary public with engagement in another culinary public. We also look at the type of content: if you publish recipes with photos, then we will not compare you with a community that relies on video content.
The engagement rate within the same category and with a similar type of content .
In other words, you compete only with related thematic communities. If you have the highest engagement rate among all healthy lifestyle communities, then you will probably end up in the “Recommendations” (even if some entertainment public has even higher engagement).
What is engagement and how do you measure it? Likes, comments and reposts?
Not only. We analyze many types of interactions, including implicit ones: time spent watching posts, watching videos, reading articles. This was done precisely so that all topics and types of content could gain coverage.
An engaged user is someone who comments, likes, spends time reading or watching, subscribes to notifications about new posts, and so on. A high-engagement community is one where there is a high percentage of engaged users relative to all subscribers. If there are 1000 people in a group and 50 of them actively respond to the content, that means 5% . If in a large community with a million subscribers only 10,000 people are active, then only 1% are engaged users.
Who received the coverage of large communities?
They were redistributed. User attention is a finite resource. If you start spending more time in Recommendations, then less time in the news feed. And vice versa. After this update, viral coverage could increase in new communities and fall in large ones, where there is already a huge loyal audience. But we will constantly improve the algorithms. Our goal is for authors of truly high-quality content, regardless of the size of the community, to receive viral coverage.
Which decline in coverage can be considered normal and which is a possible error?
Viral reach is, by definition, a fickle indicator. It can fluctuate greatly; premature conclusions should not be drawn. It is important to look at viral reach in terms of overall reach and track the trend.
Why do you support small communities just because they are small? What about large public companies?
Let's look at which communities have a good chance of getting into the "Recommendations" section.
A. Those communities that are not yet in users’ subscriptions.
Millions of people are subscribed to large communities, so we cannot show these millions posts that they may have already seen in the news feed.
B. Communities with original content .
Large communities often copy information from each other. Public pages with original content have a much better chance of getting into this section.
B. Communities with engaged users .
Large publics usually have a lower engagement rate than small communities of authors (see point 4).
D. Communities with which they interact in recommendations .
If a user has not shown interest in the publications of a community that has appeared in the “Recommendations” several times in a row, in the future he will see posts from such a public there less often. Because of this, viral reach may vary. If people have already seen your community and do not interact with it, over time the algorithms will recommend its content less and less.
Based on the “Recommendations” metrics, we see that users are more actively interacting with the content of new public pages. However, large communities often generate more interest in the smart news feed. We are looking for the right balance where quality content creators will receive decent coverage regardless of size.
But why undervalue large communities in order to give priority to small ones?
The purpose of the “Recommendations” section is to introduce users to new authors and help everyone, including large communities, find new audiences. In this regard, it is small authors who can expect a significant increase in viral coverage thanks to the new section. For a community with an audience of millions, there is already powerful viral coverage due to the smart feed and reposts. The increase in coverage from “Recommendations” for them will not be as significant relative to the overall coverage as for small publics.
What should administrators do if their coverage has dropped significantly? What content to publish and in what quantity?
Large communities should focus on working with their main audience—subscribers. The involvement of your group members is important. The key to success is active and unique users, and you can attract them only with high-quality content. Try, experiment and analyze the response of your subscribers.
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Coverage on VKontakte
Full coverage for VK is the total number of views. It includes viral, natural, and paid. This is the main statistics indicator of the VK group. This is what needs to be monitored and improved by those who run communities on this social network.
How to increase your reach on VKontakte
Previously, user feeds were only chronological. Thanks to this, all communities received views. Now the emphasis is on interesting and useful content. Therefore, recordings are not available to everyone. To increase your coverage you need to consider:
- Content
Users are interested in original posts. First they are attracted by the picture, and then by the text. At the same time, it is important that pictures are displayed well on smartphone screens, since this is the main way of consuming content on the social network.
- Involvement
User reactions also influence the formation of the feed. The post will not reach part of the audience if the message is ignored. Therefore, you need to choose the right time to publish. It is also worth analyzing competitors to choose relevant topics.
- Promotion
When using paid services, coverage increases. Advertising in other groups and targeted campaigns are suitable for this.
Is it possible to increase coverage using promotions?
There are completely legal ways to increase your audience reach for money - this includes any advertising or exchanging advertising posts with other communities. But we must understand that as a result of these events, total coverage will increase, but not the coverage of subscribers. Of course, if you advertise, you will have new readers who will join the group, but this is a secondary effect of advertising, and it is more difficult to guarantee it.
Therefore, there is a great temptation to recruit bot subscribers into your group. The more readers, even fake ones, the higher the coverage. It would seem that this is the same magic button, but in reality it is best never to use it, because fake accounts that were created automatically will be banned, and all the likes placed under your posts will lose significance and, moreover, will arouse suspicion among users and VK itself, which the community can block. Therefore, if we are to use this method of increasing coverage, then at the very first stages of the group’s development, when there is still little content and it is desirable that these are real users and not outright fakes. But despite all its apparent simplicity, this method is inferior to what we wrote about above: high-quality content is more reliable and provides not only large coverage, but also its stable growth.
Facebook Reach
The Reach tab is displayed in the statistics on the user page. Of all types of reach, paid and organic are the ones that matter.
Facebook is characterized by the complexity of its ranking algorithms. Hundreds of factors are taken into account. Here are just a few:
- Is the event from the post relevant?
- Relationship with the user who posts.
- Reaction speed, etc.
How to increase your reach on Facebook
On Facebook, attracting user interest is the most important thing, otherwise there will be no free reach. This work is worth paying the most attention to.
Receiving money from business pages is a target area for Facebook management. This often causes a reduction in organic reach. Therefore, paid promotion helps attract new audiences. This way, your post can be seen by those to whom it did not reach organically due to the fault of the social network algorithm.
Statistics in the contact of your personal page
If you run a business from a personal account and decide not to create groups in contact, or your business and your group are directly linked to your personal account, for example, you have a blog named after you, then a well-groomed personal page and its correct maintenance is very important for you. And if so, then it is very important to know the statistics of your account.
Personal statistics become available only after you have 100 subscribers, namely subscribers and not friends. Subscribers are those people who sent you a friend request, but you left them as subscribers and did not include them in your friends list.
Only after you get 100 such subscribers will the statistics button under your avatar become available. By clicking on this link you will see a statistics page very reminiscent of group statistics.
There are also tabs here, but there are only 3 of them.
Personal account statistics information is read similarly to community statistics, which I described in detail at the beginning of this article.
Reach on Instagram
Instagram's ranking algorithms are similar to Facebook, because the platforms have one owner. But here, too, the scheme is standard – coverage increases only due to unique users. The determining factors for this indicator will be:
- Go to your account from search.
- Using Direct to correspond with your account.
- Saving the post.
- Speed of reactions.
- Publication time.
In your profile, reach statistics show information for the last 7 days.
How to increase your reach on Instagram
Increasing coverage is interesting for both bloggers and business accounts. Many people solve this issue as follows:
1. Choosing the right time to publish. Instagram and Posters internal statistics will help you make the right choice. If you publish during peak hours, more users will see the information.
2. Using stories to make announcements. This will help if information is not displayed properly in the feed. To quickly navigate to your account, add relevant links.
3. Geotagging. New users can come only because the post indicates the geolocation they are interested in. Sometimes audiences are collected automatically based on geography.
4. Use relevant hashtags. There will be an increase in audience when using them, although not as large
5. Tracking “recommendations”.
Getting into this feed is a great success. At the same time, the coverage increases several tens of times.
How to increase your subscriber reach
Since reach refers to the number of unique followers, increasing it is a vital necessity for any community. It depends on how much money the project owners will be willing to pay for advertising, and what sales volumes the group administrators can count on.
Since the social network does not stand still and regularly updates its functionality, old promotion methods practically no longer work. We have selected a number of current ways to increase coverage.
Creating quality content
Every post must have a bright, attention-grabbing picture. Don't forget that most social media participants. networks use phones to log in, not computers. Therefore, images should load quickly.
Choose the topic for your post carefully. Choose information that is interesting to people, that they will want to save on their wall or share with friends.
Communication with readers
Content that does not have likes or comments will not appear in the feed. This happens due to the fact that the social network’s algorithms are constantly being improved and one of the innovations is the smart feed. It analyzes information about the number of reposts, duration of views and much more.
Try to engage people in discussions or create polls.
Choose the time when your subscribers are most active.
Keep track of news feeds. Follow the latest news and view popular hashtags. By writing a post based on such information, you can very quickly gather a large audience.
