Reach vs impressions
Written by Claire Scaramanga
Social media platforms can be argued as simple to use, however, when it comes to utilising these platforms for your business, understanding the metrics and data behind your posts can be confusing.
This article has been assigned the following categories: Social media,
The difference between social media insights and metrics
When analysing who in the world has seen your post, there are metrics to take into consideration from your insights, such as reach and impressions. This information can be useful to your business as you begin to understand whether you’re reaching your target audience and whether your content is on track for exposure to wider audiences.
Reach and impressions mean different things on different social platforms. What Facebook calls “impressions”, Twitter used to call “reach,” for example. But in general, they refer to two concepts.
What is reach?
The reach section is the data that shows you in metrics how many times your post has been seen and the number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts. If 100 total people have seen your post or ad, that means your content’s reach is 100.
This data also helpfully breaks the information down into followers and non-followers. You can analyse the insights for both your posts and stories.
Why is reach important?
Reach is useful as you can identify the posts that have been seen the most by people on your social media platforms.
These insights are tracked daily or weekly. This week-by-week information is highly valuable, as you can compare your reach depending on certain posts or social activity. Tracking these metrics is important to know whether your efforts to grow your social media accounts are successful.
What are impressions?
The impressions metric is the total number of times that all your posts have been seen. To put it simply, it’s the number of times your ad or content has been displayed on a screen. For example, if your ad popped up on people’s screens a total of 300 times, that means the number of impressions for that ad is 300.
Why are impressions important?
Brand awareness is a primary objective of social media in order to gain new consumers. Continuing to drive impressions is crucial to brand success.
Increased impressions will lead to increased engagement and a growing community size along with all the other metrics we use to prove that social media is, in fact, relevant.
