Reach vs Impressions: Which Is More Important?
Posted on 19th April 2024
If you’ve looked into marketing your business on social media, chances are you’ve heard of the terms ‘Impressions’ and ‘Reach’.
If you’ve never come across them before, it may be difficult to know what they both exactly mean, and how important they are to your overall Marketing efforts, but that doesn’t mean you should totally ignore what the numbers are saying.
Here’s more information on reach vs impressions.
What is Reach?
Your reach is the total number of people who have seen your posts. Not all of your followers will see your posts, so reach will tell you the exact number of unique post views by user.
What Are Impressions?
Impressions are the total number of times your content is displayed. This means, unlike reach, your numbers will likely be higher due to your content being displayed multiple times regardless of whether someone has clicked on it or not. Therefore, if you see a post on your feed, and then your friend reshares the same post that again appears on your feed, that means you’ve seen the same post 2 times – which counts as two impressions.
How Do Reach & Impressions Vary On Social Media?
Multiple social media sites have different terms when it comes to your reach and impressions, and use different sets of data to track them.
On Facebook, your reach and impressions are broken down by post type – organic, paid and viral.
For reach: Organic means the unique amount of people who saw your content for free, paid is those who have seen your paid content such as your ads, and viral is the unique number of people who’ve seen your content or page via another person’s actions such as tagging, sharing, liking or commenting.
For impressions: Organic is the number of times your content was displayed, paid is the number of times your paid content was displayed, viral is the times content associated with your Page was displayed by another person.
On Instagram, you’ll see that reach is known as “accounts reached,” meaning your numbers will include unique accounts that have seen your posts and stories at least once. For Reels, it includes accounts that have seen your video, no matte if they watched it fully or not.
Impressions simply measure the amount of times content was seen, or for reels the number of times videos were viewed.
On TikTok reach is the number of unique accounts that watched your video, and impressions include every time a unique account has seen the video – it’s essentially just the number of video views. TikTok’s native analytics do estimate reach, so make sure you’re aware of this if you select this as your main platform.
When it comes to LinkedIn and X (Twitter), there’s no metrics for reach. LinkedIn does show you how many accounts viewed your profile, but on both sites the only one available to you is your impressions.
So, Which Is More Important?
Both are equally important depending on what your plans for your business are, and should be measured as part of your analytic taking. Whichever you pay closer attention to is usually down to the style of business you run - If your business has a focus on building brand awareness, then reach is probably the better metric to pay attention to, but paid content will require your attention to be put towards impressions.
Understanding Reach vs Impressions will help you with making sense of your analytics, giving you better insights into your businesses social media performance which will allow you to change and modify strategies as you begin to notice trends in both metrics. Take a look at your reach and impressions today to see how your business is doing digitally.
Need further advice?
Get in touch to discuss your specific requirements and see how we can help you grow your social media presence
Tel: 07963216248
Email: chris@chrislondononline.co.uk
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Tagged as: Analytics, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Social Media, Social Media Engagement, TikTok, Twitter
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