Reach vs Impressions: Understanding Engagement Terms
Understanding engagement terms (and which to care for the most) within a social media environment.
In the present digital society, a huge mass of people is exposed to social media. It also acts as the platform for connecting to new people and knowing about new brands. If you are a modern businessperson, you should have a business-related page on the leading social networking sites.
Naturally, you would want people to get engaged with your brand and increase your sales. However, your business's social media presence might lose credibility due to the lack of proper tracking. It helps you to understand if the audience is getting properly engaged with your business profile.
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Both reach and impressions are terms that show you the level of audience engagement on your social media pages and profiles. In technical terms, they are called metrics. Here are all details about Reach and Impressions.
Reach as an Engagement Term
Reach is defined as the phenomenon occurring between social media content and the viewers. Technically, a content's reach is precisely the number of viewers who have seen it on a social networking site like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. For example, any post that 200 people see will have a reach count of 200.
Impressions as an Engagement Term
Impressions is the engagement term that relates to the basic structure of any social networking site. It is the number of times a particular content shows up on the followers' profiles on social media. The users (followers) can either click on it to view or overlook it. For example, you can consider a post having 800 impressions if the number of followers in a group of the profile is 1000. However, the impression of the content has nothing to do with the number of followers for an account.
Categories of Reach and Impressions
There are three main categories into which both Reach and Impressions are divided. They are: Organic, viral and paid. The above categories remain the same for all the social media sites; however, the style changes with the platform's characteristics. Here, all the categories are demonstrated with respect to Facebook and Twitter.
Organic Reach: While tracking a Facebook post, you can consider its organic reach as the number of unique individuals who have viewed it. Organic reach should be considered as the views from the news feed.
Viral Reach: Viral reach of a Facebook post is calculated as the number of people viewing a post from the shares and tags. A post having excellent content can get viral in no time. At times the viral reach of the post on Facebook can get remarkably higher.
Paid Reach: Calculating paid reach on Facebook can be easy as you can check the number of unique individuals watching it via the ads. You must consider a Facebook ad's performance on the number of paid reach it gets in a specific period.
Organic Impressions: Organic impressions are the number of times a specific post has popped up on different people's news feed.
Viral impressions: Viral impressions are the number of times a specific post has been there in the friends' story or status. Activities like sharing, commenting, and liking also comes in the calculation of viral impressions.
Paid Impressions: Just like paid reach, paid impressions relate to a Facebook at and the total number of times it has shown up in unique timelines.
A fact worth remembering about Twitter is that it does not consider the reach of a post as Facebook. However, you can get the tracking reports of Impressions from Twitter. The way Twitter considers an Impression of the post is different as it is the number of times a user sees a post.
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Differences between Reach and Impressions in a social media environment
As a business person, you must know the differences between Impressions and Reach as it can help you understand if your brand's social media presence is up to the mark. It can be easily defined with respect to the following aspect:
Audience Growth: Audience growth can occur on your business page if the Reach is high. However, you can consider that the impression can help your post provide the power so it can improve the number of Reaches.
Brand Awareness: You can consider the boost in brand awareness if the Reach of a specific post increases. It might not happen in the case of Impressions as a random viewer might not go through your post or visit your page even if it pops out in the newsfeed.
For Twitter, the case might be different as you can only rely on the impressions and consider if your brand is gaining the level of awareness it deserves.
Reach vs Impressions: The One to Care For
As a social media marketer working for your client, you should always keep in mind your client's goal.
When to give importance to Reach?
A brand needs to be more focused on reach if it is a new one and desires to improve its audience propagation staying in a social media environment.
When to give Importance to Impressions?
Brands that already have a proper reach and need to impress the existing customers (random/loyal) can focus more on Impressions. It can improve the credibility of the business and attract new prospects to visit the page.
Final Words
As you have understood the engagement terms to some extent, your ultimate task as a business owner is to hire experienced marketers who can work efficiently with all social media platforms. Communicate with the marketers to make them understand what exactly you desire from a social media campaign. Experienced marketers can work with insights into social media platforms and help your business reach new heights in sales. However, you need to spare enough time as these processes can take a lot of time. The best you can do is to concentrate on making attractive posts that can engage your audience easily.
For more on data and analytics in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on web.
Guest contributor: Bhavik Soni. Bhavik is a Creative Writer at Auto Monkey. They provide an original analysis of the latest happenings in the social media industry. Connect with Latest Social Media Trends and News plus tips on Twitter, Facebook and other social tools on the web.