Social Media Success

Maintaining consistent organic reach requires you to be nimble, always looking for ways to make your content more engaging. Here’s everything you need to know to maximize organic reach in 2025.

What is Organic Reach on Social Media?

On social media, organic reach is the number of people who see your content through unpaid distribution – that is, without you spending money to reach a specific audience.

In the early days of social media, this was simple. If you posted something, it appeared in the feeds of people who followed you. But as the amount of social content being posted every day grew exponentially, this became impossible.

So, each social media platform has proprietary algorithms that define how organic content is distributed – and who gets to see your posts.

Each platform has its own algorithm(s), but they all have essentially the same goal: keep people using the platform. They use a variety of signals to understand what content is most likely to keep a particular user engaged.

We’ve got a deep dive into social media algorithms here if you really want to dig into the details. For now, just keep in mind that the algorithms are the driving force behind organic reach. A subtle change in the algorithms can have big effects for social marketers, so it’s important to be nimble and stay well-informed.

What is the Difference Between Organic Reach and Paid Reach?

Just to clarify: Organic reach indicates the number of people who see your social content without your having to pay for it. They may or may not already follow you.

Paid reach indicates the number of people who see your paid social content (i.e., ads or boosted posts).

If someone sees both your organic content and your social ads, they are counted in both figures.

Is Organic Reach Declining?

We’ve been hearing about organic reach decline for years now. So what’s really going on out there? We asked social media marketers to get the real scoop on how they’ve seen their organic reach change in recent years — and what they’re doing to counter the effect.

The Problem and Fixes:

• LinkedIn Decline: A 2017 post could reach 35K+ views, but by 2024, similar content averaged only 500 views.
  • Fix: Intentional connections, meaningful engagement, and avoiding external links boosted reach back to 800+ views.
• Retail Brands on Instagram & Facebook: Organic reach dropped from 8% to 3% of followers between 2022-2024.
  • Fix: UGC (User-Generated Content), polls, and thought leadership posts increased reach.
• Instagram Reels Drop: A brand saw their Reels engagement plummet from 50,000 views to 3,000.
  • Fix: Mixing up content formats, increasing engagement via DMs and comments, and collaborating with other accounts.

How Can You Track Organic Reach?

All social platforms provide native analytics tools to track organic reach, but using a dedicated social media analytics tool like Hootsuite Analytics makes tracking easier by consolidating data from multiple platforms.