Social media can appear to be much more complex than it is. There are terms to learn and the same terms might have slightly different meanings and have different levels of significance across platforms. Social media impressions and social media reach are just two of the many terms you should know.
Reach defines who sees your content. Reach is a measure of the total number of people who see a post.
For example, if you have an ad that gets 500 displays and 250 people click on the post, then your reach is 250.
Impressions is the total number of times users have seen your post. Impressions differ from reach because the count for impressions doesn’t include people who engage with your content. Impressions counts just those who are exposed to your content.
If your ad was displayed 500 times, then your impressions count is 500.
While both metrics are similar, there are key differences. Generally impressions will be higher than reach. The reason that holds generally true is because impressions measures exposure and reach measures interaction. Impressions can often be close to, and in some cases, more than the number of your followers.
Easy to understand, right? Although it’s rather cut and dry, different sites have their own rules for how they count impressions and reach. This is important to know, because if you need to understand what you’re measuring.
Let’s look at the world’s largest social media network first, Facebook.
Facebook Impressions
“The number of times your ads were on screen,” is how Facebook for Business defines impressions. They then go on to explain how impressions are measured.
Facebook impressions are measured by the number of times your ad appeared on screen. If a Facebook user scrolls past an ad on their screen, then scrolls back up to that ad, this counts as one impression. If an ad appears for a user two different within 24 hours, these are two impressions.
Essentially, impressions on Facebook can be distilled into this: I see an ad on Facebook and scroll down past the ad, but then I change my mind and scroll back up to it. That action counts as a single impression. Now if I check Facebook again within 24 hours, and see the ad again, that will count as a second impression.
Facebook’s method differs from the industry standard for advertisements. Generally if an ad appears in a timeline, that is an impression. Facebook’s system of measurement is slightly more specific than the industry standard. This same system of measurement includes both video and image ads.
For videos, this means that there isn’t a requirement for a video to be played to count an impression. To find out how many times your video has been played, you would view the metrics under “Viewed Impressions”.
To reiterate an important point, different apps and platforms count impressions in their own unique ways. If you’re monitoring your metrics (which you should be), be aware of the small differences in measurements. If you are aware of the differences you’ll have a much better analysis.
Twitter gives you analytics for free! Results are provided immediately. How are social media impressions measured on Twitter? If someone sees your tweet, you’ve earned an impression.
How does this work with threads? If your initial tweet earns 500 impressions and then a reply to the same tweet get 400 impressions, then the total impressions for the thread is 900. The statistics are presented with ease of viewing on the site.
If you click on the “Tweets” tab, you can see your impressions visualized in bar graph form. However, note that Reach is not trackable on Twitter. Below are the analytics for the 3 Cats Labs Twitter account.
If you hover your cursor over the bars on the graph, you’ll see the number of tweets and the number of organic impressions. Twitter counts engagement as clicks on a tweet, and those are presented via a line graph on the same page.
For Instagram Reach and Impressions are separated. Instagram counts impressions as the number of times a post, story, or IGTV video is seen by a user. Reach is defined as the number of unique users who interact with a post.
How is “unique” defined by Instagram? Unique is a mix of followers and other users who your content is surfaced to based upon shared interests. For instance, if a user likes and follows multiple shoe brands, that user’s timeline will be populated with suggestions for other shoe focused profiles.
If you’re reviewing your Instagram analytics and you find that impressions are higher than reach, then it’s likely that your followers or other users are viewing posts multiple times. For example, every time or every other time they open the app.
More Important: Social Media Impressions or Reach?
Ah, the big question. Well, we’re answer it with a resounding, “It depends.” Bummer, right?
To determine which is more important, you need to consider your business goals. If you’re focused on ads, then the more weighty metric will be impressions. This is because all of your promoted and boosted content is measured by the number of people who see your ad.
If you promote a tweet on Twitter, the analytics provided will be the number of those who saw your ad. Also, you might want to focus your advertising efforts on Facebook and Twitter because they’re impression driven platforms.
If your goal is to raise brand awareness and seeking to grow the engagement with your brand, then you will be focused on the reach of your social media posts. The metrics for reach can help you understand the number of leads you’re gaining by user interaction with your brand. For this, you might want to turn to Instagram.
Tracking engagement is key to measuring and understanding the ROI of your business social media accounts. If you’re still unsure of what your goal should be, focus on your social media impressions and reach because these help you count leads and how many people are seeing your posts.
Need some ideas of what more you can do with your posts? Check out our list of cheap end effective strategies..
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