Organic Reach

In social media, organic reach means the total number of people who see your stuff 'naturally'—that is, without the help of any paid promotion. On a platform like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, the users who see what you've posted 'unprompted' really count as the audience you've achieved through organic means. FB and the rest of the platforms have these things called 'algorithms' that largely determine who sees what, when, and how much. If you think about it, if Zuck and Co. (or whoever) are going to let at least some of us have unpaid reach on their platforms, they're obviously going to do it as a way to make those platforms seem appealing to all of us. So there's the organic reach Facebook really wants you to care about. But even if you're a 'Facebook person,' you're obviously not going to pander to FB just for the sake of pandering, right? That's what I thought too. Still, I've got some issues with worrying about this idea of organic reach as the metric you've got to care about. To the extent that Zuck and Co. are letting a bunch of us see a 'natural' sort of visibility is from a platform's perspective that's largely lost the plot of what's supposed to happen when we're all connecting on platforms.