What is organic reach, and how can you improve yours?

Maintaining high organic reach is a top priority for most social marketers. But it’s not easy. Regular algorithm changes and increasing pressure to buy social ads can lead to frustrating drops in the number of people who see your social content, seemingly out of nowhere.

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: “When I first started on LinkedIn in late 2017, I easily got 35K+ views on my content,” says Heidi Medina, social media marketing strategist and business coach. “In 2022, my average post reached about 8,000 people, generating 200+ reactions and 100+ comments. By November 2024, similar content reached an average of 500 people with 35 reactions and 47 comments.”

The fix: To counter the decline, Heidi has focused on intentional connection and meaningful engagement with her target audience while avoiding external links in her content. She has now brought her LinkedIn reach back up to 800+ views and 60+ comments per post.

The problem: “In 2024, we saw a 30% drop in organic engagement on client campaigns for retail brands within three months due to algorithm updates prioritizing personal connections over brand content,” said James Hacking, founder of Socially Powerful.

The fix: Using interactive elements like polls, live streams, and short videos actually increased engagement to 15% higher than before the drop. Shifting a campaign from carousel posts to Stories with polls increased impressions by 40%.

The problem: “For one client in the retail sector, we observed a sharp drop in Facebook organic reach between 2022 and 2024, decreasing from an average 8% of their follower base to less than 3%,” said Eugene Mischenko, president of the E-Commerce & Digital Marketing Association. Similarly, on Instagram, carousel posts that previously reached around 10% of followers were only reaching 5% in 2023, even when engagement rates were strong.”

The fix: Focusing on engagement and interactions started to bring reach back up. UGC and polls saw 20% higher engagement rates. On LinkedIn, reach improved when posting thought leadership and longer form content.

The problem: “A few months ago, our Instagram Reels were hitting about 50,000 views and growing,” said Tom Van den Heuvel, CMO at wetracked.io. “We thought we had it all figured out. Then, almost overnight, those numbers plummeted to just 3,000–5,000 views per reel. That’s a 90%+ drop in reach. It was a tough pill to swallow.”

The fix: Several strategies have helped organic reach start to recover, including switching up the types of content (Reels, carousels, Stories), more engagement through comments and DMs, posting UGC, and collaborating with other accounts.

How can you track organic reach?

All of the social platforms have native analytics tools that allow you to track your organic reach. These are effective and free to use, but it can be cumbersome to switch between all the different platforms to track your organic reach across accounts.

A dedicated social media analytics tool is an easier way to track organic reach alongside other important metrics. Hootsuite Analytics lets you easily track the organic reach of your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok channels in one place  so you can replicate what works and improve your results.

9 ways to increase organic reach in 2025

We’ve already provided some quick tips from social media marketers fighting organic reach decline. Here’s a deeper look at strategies to help boost your organic reach this year.

1. Post at the right times

Time matters a lot when it comes to extending social reach. Early engagement is a key signal to most social media algorithms, and you only get that early engagement if you post when your audience is online.

So what exactly is the right time to reach your target audience?

That varies significantly by platform, geographic location, audience demographics, and even industry, so we’ve got a whole post packed with original data broken down into pretty specific detail.

If you’re not ready to dig into that level of detail, here are Hootsuite’s latest findings on the overall best times to post by platform.

Within Hootsuite Analytics, you can also get custom best time to post recommendations based on your specific followers and past content performance.

2. Post at the right frequency

Knowing the best time to post is one aspect of creating a consistent social media content strategy. The other is knowing how often to post. Again, this varies significantly based on industry, and we’ve got a super-detailed breakdown here.

But overall, here are Hootsuite’s findings for the most effective weekly posting frequency as of January 2025:

• Facebook: 2, 11, 13, or 15 posts
• Instagram: 2 or 3 posts
• LinkedIn: 2, 3, 4, or 11 posts
• X: Up to 11 posts

3. Customize your content for each platform

Never take a one-size-fits-all approach to social media marketing, especially with organic content. To reach the most people, organic posts need to be optimized. And to optimize quality content, you need to understand the platform (and the associated audience) you’re optimizing for.

First off, each platform has different requirements for image size, caption length, number of hashtags, and so on. And none of the platforms love content that contains a watermark from a competitor network.

That means you can’t just create one piece of content and blast it across all your channels. Instead, use the tools built into the Hootsuite dashboard to customize your post for each platform, all from one screen.

Or, lean into AI tools like OwlyWriter AI to adapt existing content assets for each platform. Hootsuite identified greater reliance on generative AI as one of the top social trends for 2025.

Of course, it’s not all image sizes and character counts. Each platform has a different feeling and style. Content that performs well on LinkedIn will likely not take off on TikTok. To extend your reach on a platform, you need to understand how to act like a native of that platform, so you can join the existing culture rather than shouting into a void.

Look at how the Washington Post shares the same story completely differently on different platforms:

A bonus tip here: To increase reach on Instagram, add audio even to formats where you don’t use audio on other platforms. Adam Mosseri recently specified that adding audio to photos and carousels can help extend reach through recommendations.

4. Provide real (original) value

Organic content needs to offer followers something of value. Give people a reason to follow you, keep following you, and share your posts. Value can take many forms – like entertainment, knowledge, motivation, or the opportunity to connect with a community. Sometimes you can combine several of these aspects into one piece of content:

Keep in mind that promoting your products or your brand is (in most cases) not particularly valuable content from a follower’s perspective. Of course, you can still promote your products and services in your organic content, but don’t expect those to be the posts that get the highest organic reach. That’s why we recommend the 80-20 rule.

Social algorithms prioritize original content – because that’s most valuable to both the platform and to its users. Instagram in particular has said they want to reward creators rather than aggregators. If you want to reshare someone else’s content, make sure to add your own perspective using tools like stitch.

OwlyWriter AI can help here too – it helps generate ideas for content as well as the wording of the content itself.

Try experimenting with avoiding links in your social content. Since social algorithms want to keep you on the platform, including links may limit your reach. You’ll need to include links sometimes, but look for ways to provide more value on-platform to maximize reach.

5. Find the content formats that resonate with your audience (existing and new)

While video is still a standout content format on many social platforms, it’s got some competition. For example, Hootsuite’s latest research shows that albums get the greatest engagement on Facebook, while Carousels perform best on Instagram. On LinkedIn, videos are still the top content format.

That said, on Meta platforms, Reels have their own algorithm that give them greater reach to new audiences who do not yet follow you. So even though they have a lower engagement rate, they may be more effective for extending your organic reach and brand awareness — especially to new viewers.

You’ll need to do some experimentation to understand what works best for your brand, but the formula should likely include Reels to bring in new eyeballs and albums/carousels to create engagement and boost organic social media reach among your existing follower base.

6. Encourage engagement

But don’t simply ask for a like — algorithms don’t favor content that creates superficial engagement. Instead, focus on meaningful engagement. Ask a question that will encourage thoughtful comments.

You can also try turning engagement on its head with proactive engagement. That’s the trend of brands joining in the conversation happening in creators’ comments section. Hootsuite found that 41% of organizations have tried this strategy.

This obviously won’t increase organic reach of any particular piece of content you post. Instead, it’s a long-game strategy. Proactive engagement increases your visibility, which can bring new viewers and followers to your content over time.

7. Collaborate

Collaborating with another brand, creator, or thought leader is an easy way to get your content in front of a larger organic audience.

An influencer marketing campaign is one way to make this work. In this case, you put some of your social budget into the collaboration itself, but the aim is for the resulting content to achieve organic reach.

(You can also boost your influencer marketing posts for even more exposure, but that’s paid reach, so we won’t get into that here.)

Another option is to find other brands or thought leaders where there’s a mutual benefit to collaborating. So, instead of paying an influencer to create content, you could work on collaborative content, share ideas, and cross-promote. This involves no budget at all but can still expand your organic reach to new audiences.

Finally, you can collaborate (for free) with your own audience. Several social marketers told us that user-generated content saw greater reach than standard brand content. Users like to see themselves reflected in social content, and this is a surefire way to make that happen.

8. Identify opportunities for micro-virality

A solid social listening program helps you understand what your audience is talking about on social platforms, so you can create content that fits into these conversations.

Aligning with the topics your audience wants to talk about is good day-to-day social strategy for organic reach. To take things a step further, keep your ear to the ground for relevant content trends that provide the chance to achieve small-scale virality within your target niche.

A robust social listening tool like Hootsuite Listening helps you identify and analyze trends. This means you can understand whether a trend will resonate with your audience, as well as how much runway you have left to get in on the trend before it fades.

9. Get to know social media SEO

You may notice we didn’t include a section on hashtags in this post. While hashtags are not totally dead on social media, they are not the powerhouse of discoverability that they used to be.

Instead, it’s important to understand social media SEO and incorporate the relevant techniques into your captions and alt tags.

Gen Z in particular uses social media like a search engine – but significant portions of the total population turn to social search when researching new products.

In addition to our overall social SEO post, we’ve got detailed posts for SEO on several of the social platforms to help you expand your organic reach:

Save time managing your social media and get your content seen using Hootsuite. Schedule and publish content, engage your audience, and measure the performance of all your accounts, across networks — all from a single dashboard. Try it free today.