Total Reach in Account Summary

At SocialRank we are always looking for ways to make it easier to get the information you need about your audience. This consists of helping you find the right people in your audience, but more recently also accessing the summary information about them to give a bird’s eye view.

One thing we added last week was a long requested metric brands and agencies would ask for called Total Reach. We were hesitant about adding it because we believe the number is a bit hogwash — but because it is a metric the industry looks at and finds valuable we put our personal reasons aside and added it to the summary information.

For those that don’t know what Total Reach is, it is the sum of all the followers of your followers. It takes all your followers and adds up how many followers each has. The number is usually really large. But this is because it contains duplicates that may follow multiple accounts that follow you. So if you follow @Nike AND 500 accounts that also follow Nike — you are showing up 501 times in Total Reach. You can see why it’s sort of an inaccurate data point.

To offer a True Total Reach, what you need to do is take all the accounts that follow @X and somehow grab all of the followers of those followers. Then remove the duplicates and voila you would have an accurate and useful number of True Total Reach (we are working on this but it isn’t easy). In the meantime, we added Total Reach so take a look at your Summary (in “Show Summary”).

As always, hit us up at hi@socialrank.com if you have any questions, comments, requests, jokes, concerns — we want to hear it all!