Which Is More Important: Reach vs. Impressions in Social Media Analytics?
You’re busy, right? You only have so much time to keep track of countless analytics, for one thing. I mean, why can’t they just keep track of themselves, am I right? And social media analytics? Those are kind of a different ball of wax compared to website analytics and sales reports. For social media, you have follower counts and engagement rates to consider, to name a few. And don’t even get me started on conversion insights! Two of the more basic metrics—reach and impressions—might get overlooked in all this number crunching. But, they form part of the foundation of numbers critical to measuring the success of any Influencer Marketing campaign. They may even be the most important numbers for you to watch because they influence everything else. How? Let’s explore.
This Post at a Glance
What is Reach?
When analyzing your Influencer Marketing campaign’s success, reach calculates top-of-funnel activity, such as awareness. Specifically, reach is the total number of unique people who see yours or partnering influencers’ content.
You might think that if you post content on your brand’s account, then it’ll show up in all of your followers’ feeds. You might also think that influencers’ content will automatically show up in all of their followers’ news feeds. But, sadly, that’s not the case. Instead, as you might already know, social media analytics are more complicated than that thanks to algorithms. They also differ slightly from platform to platform. So, what’s a marketer to do?
Reach on Facebook
Facebook, for example, only shows content to a small percentage of a business’ or influencer’s following initially, based on many factors. The four most important of those are:
- Type of post (text, video, image, etc.)
- Relationship: who a user typically interacts with (if a user has interacted with your account previously, they’re more likely to see more of your content now)
- Recency (newer posts are shown first)
- Popularity
That last one deserves a little bit more of an explanation. Popularity has a lot to do with those pesky algorithms, the ones that customize every user’s feed. This might work great for the general public, not so much for businesses … unless you understand them (more about that later). For example, say you post content to your Facebook page, which has 2,000 followers. Looking at your insights, you’ll be able to see how many of them saw your content. If it was 17, that means that only .8 percent of your followers saw it.
But, if some of even that .8 percent like your post enough to share it, then Facebook will dish it up in more of your followers’ feed and your reach will increase.
Reach on Instagram
Instagram is similar. Its algorithm (actually, algorithms) is similar, but it also looks at a user’s “score of interest” to determine what to dish up to them first, in their feeds, Reels, and Stories. The score is an “educated guess” about how likely you are to interact with a post in one or more of 12 ways, which include looking at it for more than a few seconds, saving it, and tapping on the profile photo.
Reach on TikTok
TikTok also curates and customizes content for each user’s For You page, with an expanded list of criteria like:
- Which accounts you follow
- Creators you’ve hidden
- Comments you’ve posted on others’ videos
- Videos you’ved, liked, shared, added to your favorites, or marked as “not interested” or inappropriate
- If you’ve watched longer videos all the way to the end
Reach on Pinterest
Pinterest also uses an algorithm, but you could say it’s simpler than the other platforms. This is because it’s based primarily on popularity, or how many times a pin (or “save”) has been repinned. Of course, repinning is essentially the same thing as sharing, and the number of repins increases the more it’s shared.Pinterest reach increases incrementally, just like on other platforms.
Reach on Twitter
Twitter doesn’t track reach, but it does track impressions, and those increase—you guessed it—the more people reply and like others’ tweets.
Tips for Getting ROI on Reach
Of course, these are major simplifications of complicated processes, but you get the idea. The main point is that neither influencers nor brands can afford to throw up any piece of so-so content and wait to see what happens. On all platforms, even the ones that don’t provide reach numbers, reach is foundational. The better the quality of the content (i.e., the more relevant to the audience), the more it gets engaged with, so the more users it gets shown to, and the more interactions can happen. This means not just more brand awareness for you, but also an increased chance of conversions to product purchases.
I bet you’re asking yourself, “How am I going to accomplish anything—let alone conversions—if I’m hampered by the platform’s algorithms right off the bat?”
Well, you could encourage more of those .8 percent people to like or comment on your post. In that case, it’d be shown to more of your followers, who would hopefully like or comment, too. As a result, your reach would incrementally grow. A better solution? Work with influencers. They offer these advantages, just by virtue of them being “real-life” people, not brands:
- They post from their accounts, which aren’t pages. Hootsuite says: “The Facebook algorithm prioritizes sharing content between people rather than from pages to people, so your goal should be for users to engage with … your content so that it’s visible by their friends and family.”
- Interacting with their followers is their bread and butter. Responding to users’ comments on any platform is not just a nice thing to do. It’s crucial to growing reach. Influencers know that and have the time to do that. They take what might be a time-consuming task for your team off your plate.
What Are Impressions?
Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, no matter the engagement on the post. Impressions can far exceed reach because a person might see the same content multiple times if it gets shared multiple times.
In a campaign we did with the Idahoan Potato brand, for example, 108 Instagram influencers achieved a combined reach of almost 5 million people. Between that and what was achieved during a Twitter campaign, the content impressions (i.e., number of times each influencer posted to their blogs and social media accounts, multiplied by the amount of unique monthly visitors and followers, respectively) were an astounding 11 times that—more than 53 million.
The Magic Number: Engagement!
Which brings me to the definition of engagement, and how it relates to reach and impressions. As important as they are, engagement is definitely the magic number and it’s integral to increasing both reach and impressions.
All social sites want quality content so users stay on their sites longer. Influencers know that producing quality, authentic content is what keeps their audiences coming back and interacting. So, if you’re seeing low engagement numbers on your brand’s accounts, the best way to take things to the next level is Influencer Marketing.
Reach vs. Impressions: Which Is More Important in Social Media Analytics?
When creating social media analytics reports, both reach and impressions are key. But, you could say that all success—all engagements and beyond—starts with reach. Even then, even if you or your influencers are reaching tens of millions of people, it means little if only 1,000 of them actually show interest by liking, hearting, commenting, or sharing a post. That’s why, to increase brand awareness, what it really comes down to is engagement. Then platform algorithms can start to work for you instead of against you, showing your influencers’ content to more and more people. Of course, that means encouraging your influencers to produce more content that resonates more with their audiences, maybe giving more license to them than you would otherwise.
So, what does all of this mean to you when you’re setting up or running an Influencer Marketing campaign? Start out with the knowledge that the more followers that see your influencers’ content, the higher the chance for both impressions and engagement. So influencer follower counts do matter. And, as I said, you can get a lot of reach and impressions out the door just by going with influencers. But providing them with what they need to make awesome, engaging content is also key. And if you decide to work with lower-tiered influencers, who have fewer followers but higher engagement, you can do a paid ad campaign to help increase both impressions and engagement. We all know it’s a smaller step from engagement to conversion than from view to conversion.
Wrap It Up
Don’t you feel armed and ready to go now that you fully understand what reach and impressions are, what they look like in the major social media platforms, and how integrally they’re related to engagement rates? Now that you understand more about how, ultimately, it all still comes down to high-quality content, you can double down on cultivating relationships with those influencers who produce that kind of content on a regular basis.