Reach and impressions are two marketing metrics that show you how many people are seeing your content. These metrics don’t tell the full story of your content’s impact, but both give you an idea of how many eyeballs you attract.
Let’s face it: Social media content can’t benefit your business unless someone sees it. Measuring reach and impressions is a baseline aspect of social media management so you know that your content is showing up on social channels, which opens the doors to likes, shares, comments, and clicks.
Here’s a rundown on the differences between reach vs. impressions and how to measure and use these metrics in your social media marketing.
Contents:
What Is Reach vs. Impressions?
Key Differences Between Reach and Impressions
Importance of Reach and Impressions in Marketing
Measuring Reach and Impressions on Different Platforms
Choosing the Right Metric for Your Marketing Goals
Best Practices for Tracking and Analyzing Reach and Impressions
Understanding the Value of Reach and Impressions with Meltwater
What Is Reach vs. Impressions?
Reach vs. impressions are similar but measure slightly different things:
- Reach: The number of unique users who saw your content.
- Impressions: The total number of times your content has been viewed.
Focusing on reach and impressions together will give you an idea of whether people are seeing your content and how often it appears in their feeds.
Key Differences Between Reach and Impressions
When reviewing the data, impressions are always equal to or greater than than reach.
Why is this?
It’s because the same person might see your content more than once. Let’s look at some scenarios:
- 100 users view your content once
- Reach: 100
- Impressions: 100
- 50 users view your content twice
- Reach: 50
- Impressions: 100
- 100 users view your content once; 50 additional users view your content twice
- Reach: 150
- Impressions: 200
Social media reach vs. impressions can mean different things on different channels, too. For example, Facebook defines reach as the number of people who saw content posted from your Facebook page and the posts you are tagged in. We’ll dig into these details more in a moment.
Importance of Reach and Impressions in Marketing
You might think that your reach would be the same as the number of followers you have. If they’re following you, then they’re going to see your content, right?
Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Neither reach nor impressions are limited to those who follow you on social media. Social channels use complex algorithms to show your content to people who are most likely to be interested in it.
This is ultimately a good thing. It lets you get in front of people who aren’t following you but still might be interested in your posts. That means new opportunities to grow your audience!
If reach and impressions are roughly equal, that means people are only seeing your post one time (on average). This could indicate people aren’t finding your posts engaging (e.g., they’re not coming back to view the post) or that you’re not reaching the right people.
If you notice a low reach but a comparatively high number of impressions, that’s a good sign. It means the same people are viewing your content over and over again, which helps build familiarity with your brand. It also indicates they found your content to be valuable, which can help you sniff out what type of content your audience likes best.
TIP: Did you know AI tools can help you grow your social channels' reach? Check out our free Ultimate Guide to AI for Social Media Management for plenty of tips, tricks, and prompts!
Measuring Reach and Impressions on Different Platforms
Reach vs. impressions on social media can vary by channel. Get familiar with how your channel tracks reach and impressions so you can understand the full scope of your metrics.
Let’s look at some examples.
Instagram is pretty straightforward when it comes to impressions vs. reach. Instagram impressions refer to the number of times your content was seen. Reach reflects the number of unique accounts that see your content.
Using Instagram analytics, you can filter impressions vs. reach by duration (e.g., the past 7, 30, or 90 days) and by audience demographics, such as gender or age.
X (Formerly Twitter)
Twitter impressions and reach are a little different than Instagram. For starters, Twitter doesn’t calculate reach.
For impressions, Twitter calculates the number of times your Tweet appears in user feeds. As with other social media channels, these are not unique views.
You can view impressions in your Twitter analytics, which you’ll need to activate first. From there, you can see impressions per Tweet or for Tweets over the last 30 days.
Facebook measures reach by calculating how many people saw content posted directly from your Facebook page and posts you’re tagged in. So, if other accounts are tagging you, views of those posts will appear in your analytics.
The same is true for impressions. This is the number of times people see content from your page or posts you’re tagged in.
Facebook adds an extra layer of visibility if you’re running paid ads. You can see reach and impressions for paid vs. organic content, which can give you unique perspectives on what’s working and what isn’t in your social marketing.
TikTok
TikTok’s Research Audience shows you how many unique users have viewed your content. This is the same as reach on other social media channels.
Total Video Views is the same as impressions. It tells you how many times your video has been viewed but doesn’t differentiate between unique viewers.
Similar to X, there is no Reach metric on LinkedIn. The platform does offer total post impressions, which you can access from your analytics.
You can also see impressions for a specific piece of content by clicking on the post. The number of impressions will appear at the bottom of the post.
YouTube
There is no Reach metric on YouTube.
There is an Impressions metric, though. This illustrates how many times your video thumbnail appears in user feeds or search results.
Other metrics include total clicks, total video views, and the amount of watch time your videos receive.
Choosing the Right Metric for Your Marketing Goals
A key part of social media management is understanding which metrics to measure and why they matter.
It’s a good idea to track both reach and impressions, as each adds context to the other:
- Measure reach when you want to know how far your content is traveling on social media.
- Measure impressions when you want to know if people find your content engaging or whether the algorithm is homing in on your target audience.
Reach and impressions are just two of many metrics that you can track. While helpful, they’re not enough on their own to reach your marketing goals.
That’s why you need another key piece of the puzzle: reach vs. impressions vs. engagement.
Engagement refers to any type of action a user takes on your post. It might be a like, comment, share, or even a click on your link.
For example, you might have a high number of impressions but very low engagement. This might indicate that you’re missing your target audience; your content isn’t connecting with relevant users.
If you’re running a paid ad, low engagement might be due to ad fatigue. People are seeing your ad over and over again and have become immune to it.
Or it could mean something else entirely. That’s why context matters. The more you know, the better you can connect the dots and figure out how to improve your results.
Combined, these metrics can tell a much bigger story about your social media content and its impact. Ideally, you’ll have a big reach, an even higher impression count, and high engagements — the trifecta that shows that people see and enjoy your posts.
Best Practices for Tracking and Analyzing Reach and Impressions
Each channel’s built-in social media analytics tools are a good starting point. They do the heavy lifting of aggregating reach and impressions across all of your posts on that channel.
To gain even more value from marketing reach vs. impressions, follow these best practices:
- Connect unique impressions vs. reach with your content strategy. For example, if you’re using social listening to decide what to post, see how impressions vs reach improve compared to historical data.
- Track your results over time. Industry averages are helpful, but take them with a grain of salt and define your own benchmarks using your own data.
- Use third-party platforms like Meltwater for a centralized view. Aggregated marketing reach vs. impressions gives you a more complete story of how your efforts are paying off.
Following these best practices will help you understand how reach and impressions affect your performance and how to use these metrics to improve over time.
Understanding the Value of Reach and Impressions with Meltwater
Meltwater’s social media management tool gives you a bird’s eye view of all of your social media posts and analytics. Track performance from a single place so you can see what’s working in your social strategy and where you can improve. Meltwater automatically pulls reach, impressions, and engagement data from all of your connected channels for holistic and granular insights.
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