Happy New Year and welcome back to Brown Bag Marketing Bits. This week, I’d like to chat with you about social media metrics, specifically impressions on social media. As business owners, you may or may not be aware of all the analytic data available to you through the different social media platforms that you use to promote and support your businesses. And even if you are aware that this data exists, you may not completely understand what it all means or how can be useful to you. One of the many benefits for tracking your number of social media impressions is that it can help you measure how much brand awareness your posts or ads are generating for your business.

Understanding Social Media Impressions

• In social media, an impression is when your content is viewed once by a user. Your content gathers impressions on whichever platform you use to post — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, or email — through a post, an ad, or some other type of information. So when you refer to the number of impressions your piece of information receives, you are referring to how many times your information comes across the screen of a user.
• The different mediums track how many times your information comes across the screen of a user. If you have 1000 impressions, your post was seen 1000 times. That doesn't mean it was seen by 1000 people. It could be that your post was seen by 500 people, two times each. Maybe somebody went back and saw it again. Or perhaps they scrolled through their feed multiple times and saw your post multiple times. Sometimes with an ad, you can pay for multiple impressions to the same user because you want that same user to see the same thing several times. You could say the impression is how many times users are impressed with your information.
• Impressions can be time based. Time-based impressions are tracked per post over a certain time period. You can see how many impressions a post has gotten over its lifetime or over a period of days, weeks, months, etc. This helps you know when your ads or posts are getting good traction with your audience.

Impressed by Impressions?

Just remember that your impressions are not how many users you have, or how many individual people you reach but how many times your piece of content is seen. The more impressions you have, the more brand awareness you generate, which is essential to maximizing business success. In future Bits, we’ll discuss how you can use this data to become more strategic in your social media marketing.

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.

Oprah Winfrey