Understanding the role of social media impressions in your online presence
Social media impressions are the digital equivalent of a first handshake or, in some cases, a passing glance across a crowded room. This important metric reflects the number of times a post or advertisement is displayed on someone’s social media feed, regardless of whether it was clicked, liked, shared, or commented on.
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Impressions on social media as a metric might not garner the spotlight in the same way its counterparts (clicks, likes, and shares) do. However, in our world of white-label social media services and SaaS platforms, impressions yield a lot more power than you think. This article will help you better understand what impressions are, how they’re calculated, and what impact they have on your online presence.
Table of Contents
What are social media impressions?
At the heart of it all, social media impressions are the number of times your content is displayed on users’ feeds—be it an organic post, a killer meme, or an advertising campaign. Impressions account for every view of your content and this metric counts repeat users, not just new views. The definition of social media impressions varies from that of reach or engagement, which simply cover how many individual users have seen your content and how many have interacted with it, respectively.
Analyzing this important metric can help you better understand your content’s reach. Impressions provide insight into how many times your content could potentially have been read, but every impression doesn’t necessarily lead to an interaction. They’re subtly powerful, helping you gauge the magnitude of your potential audience. While they don’t actively engage, the viewers of your content silently acknowledge that your content does, in fact, exist, and does give you the opportunity to connect with your audience.
Social media impressions vs. reach
Social media metrics can feel like a tangled web of numbers that don’t make much sense sometimes, so let’s break it down and take a look at social media impressions vs. reach. While they’re often misconstrued as the same thing.
Social media impressions, as mentioned earlier, are the total number of times your content has shown up in user feeds. It accounts for every appearance on a person’s screen, including those who are seeing it multiple times. This number represents the potential number of views your content could have, and it’s important to keep in mind that not every person who had your post in their feed stopped to read it.
Social media reach, on the other hand, is how many unique users have seen your content. If your content appears in a user’s feed more than once, it’s only counted as one occurrence. This metric is about diversity over quantity and helps you better understand who your audience is and may help give your business social media ideas to reach new people and demographics.
Measuring social media impressions
While you can often measure social media impressions directly on the platforms you post to, these numbers don’t always give you the entire picture. Using a third-party platform can give you more insight into your social media presence as a whole, helping you better understand if the social media content creation strategies you’re following are working and where you need to tweak them.
There are plenty of third-party platforms that can provide you with comprehensive data about your social media performance. Most of these platforms enable you to manage multiple accounts, which makes them ideal for social media marketing managers and multi-location businesses. With tools like Social Marketing from Vendasta, you can benefit from comprehensive, detailed social media metrics including reach, engagement, and impressions, viewed from a single dashboard that makes it easy to compare your success across multiple platforms.
Other features you’ll typical find in third-party social media tools like Social Marketing include:
- Direct posting: Upload your content to Social Marketing and post it across multiple platforms with the click of a button or schedule it ahead of time.
- Lead generation: Reach new audiences by searching hashtags and keywords that are relevant to your campaign or service and product offerings.
- Engagement: Respond to comments, mentions, and direct messages directly.
While every third-party platform is different, some, including Social Marketing, also come with extra features such as built-in content composers and stock images. Additionally, you can also leverage link tracking to see how many link visits to your website have originated from your posted content.
Factors influencing social media impressions
Impressions on social media can be affected by several factors and thankfully, while you might need to tweak your strategy from time to time, most of those factors are within your control.
Creating relevant high-quality posts
The answer to gaining the attention of the social media masses is relevant, high-quality content. Whether you’re creating videos, slideshows, or still images, relevance is key. It should speak to your audience’s likes, dislikes, needs, and wants, whether that means you’re posting about the latest industry trends, topical events, or memes that are setting the internet ablaze.
That said, relevant posts are useless if they don’t contain high-quality visuals and engaging copy. And that doesn’t just mean posting visually attractive images and copy with perfect grammar (although these things do help), it means offering your audience something they can use. Craft posts that offer useful tips or try to speak to your audience’s emotions, whether that’s through a heartfelt story or something that makes them laugh.
Posting at the right time and frequency
Understanding timing and frequency is essential in gaining social media impressions on your profiles. These factors ensure that your posts reach your audience at times when they’re most likely to engage.
Knowing when to post your content is crucial. You want your content to go live when your audience is active online and the times your audience is most active can depend on several factors, including the social media platforms you’re using and the specific demographics of your audience. Utilize the analytics provide by social media platforms and third-party apps like Social Marketing to identify these key time slots.
As for frequency, balance is key. Post too infrequently and your audience might forget you but if you post too often, you run the risk of overwhelming your followers and losing your audience. Strike a balance that keeps your brand consistently in the conversation without causing audience fatigue.
Targeting your audience
When you create your posts, zeroing in on the right crowd can help you gain social media impressions and improve metrics like reach and engagement. To make sure your posts are meaningful, define your target audience. Are you catering to the wants, needs, and interests of baby boomers or are you garnering attention from tech-savvy millennials?
Regardless of your audience, it’s vital to make sure your content resonates with them. Use tools like Social Marketing and platform-provided metrics to segment your audience based on factors like age, location, interests, and behaviors. You can also consider psychographics, which delve deeper into your audience’s lifestyle, values, opinions, and interests.
Keep in mind that people are most likely to respond to content that aligns with their beliefs and appeals to their emotions. From there, craft posts with your audience in mind to improve your chances of generating authentic, organic engagement.
Tips for creating compelling content to boost social media impressions
We touched on creating relevant, high quality content above and how important that is if you want to gain impressions on social media. Now let’s talk about how you can do that.
First and foremost, remember that your online reputation relies on your social media. If it isn’t well-run and put together in a way that makes sense, you’ll quickly see your metrics decline as follower interest wanes. If you don’t have the chops to handle social media on your own, consider seeking out an agency that sells social media packages and can help you maintain a successful online presence.
If you plan to create your own content, though, make sure to follow these tips:
Craft compelling headlines and captions
It might seem like the video or image you post is the most critical part of your social media content but the caption and headlines you use are just as important. In fact, Facebook videos that include captions increase watch time by as much as 12 percent (Social Pilot) and captions with a well-written call-to-action can increase click-through rates by up to 300 percent (AdRoll).
The words you choose to write your social media headlines and captions should resonate with your audience in the same way that the visual content you post does. Use language that’s relatable for your audience’s age group and when it makes sense, lean into colloquialisms to keep your captions more casual and conversational. Social media isn’t the place for technical or formal writing.
It’s also important to be concise. Brevity in your captions is the best way to keep your audience’s attention and ensure they read the whole post, and that can improve your social media impressions. Finish off your post with a short but powerful call-to-action. Use clear language that directs the reader to take the desired action, whether that’s visiting your website, sharing your content, or leaving a comment.
One final tip: harness the power of storytelling in your captions. Use words that evoke curiosity and emotion to give your audience a compelling reasons to engage with the content you create.
Utilize eye-catching videos and multimedia elements
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and when it comes to social media impressions, the same can easily be said about video and other multimedia elements like GIFs and infographics. Using eye-catching video content helps your social posts stand out from the crowd.
Video is particularly effective for social media storytelling. It offers dynamic, engaging comment that makes it easier to give your audience more than you’re able to with a static image or text alone. Whether it’s a product demo, a behind-the-scenes peek at your business, or an animated explainer, video is almost always the best way to captivate and engage your audience. That said, visual elements such as infographics can help you deliver important information in a way that’s easy for your audience to digest so don’t discount their usefulness on social media.
To maximize your impressions on social media, make sure the visual elements you post align with your brand and the message you’re trying to convey. Lastly, remember that quality matters. Videos don’t need to be professionally produced, but they should be filmed using a quality camera, a steady hand, and good lighting in a place that’s free from background noise and clutter.
Incorporate trending topics and hashtags
Stay up to date with what’s trending on the social media platforms you use. Follow trending topics and hashtags daily and when it makes sense, incorporate them into your captions. When trending topics aren’t relevant, keep in mind that hashtags are still important—as long as they’re relevant to your brand and your post. In fact, Tweets with hashtags increase engagement by 100 percent (Twitter), so don’t skip this important step.
Keep in mind that hashtags are your ticket to increased visibility. They function like a social media search engine, helping users discover content from brands and other users that align with their interests and needs. That said, some platforms’ algorithms favor posts with a few well-chosen hashtags over those with a flood of loosely-related ones so choose wisely.
Best practices to improve social media impressions
If your social media impressions are on the low side, there’s plenty you can do to get them up. Working with an agency that can provide social media management tips or services can be a great way to keep your social media consistent and on-brand.
Furthermore, following best practices to improve your social media impressions can help get your online presence where you want it to be.
Engage the audience
Engaging your audience isn’t just about earning likes and shares, it’s a strategic move that can boost your social media impressions, as well as other metrics like engagement, reach, and click-through rates. When you engage, you don’t just talk to your audience; you start a dialogue and that reciprocal relationship can be a game-changer for your online presence.
Improve your audience engagement by:
- Encouraging interaction: Pose questions, solicit opinions, and spark debates with your social media posts. These types of posts invite engagement and that, in turn, generates more views for your content, improving your social media impressions. Remember, when your audience interacts with your posts, it appears on their followers’ feeds too.
- Respond to messages, comments, and mentions quickly: Most social media users expect a quick response when they interact with brands. 89 percent of consumers expect brands to respond to comments and messages within a day (Sprout Social) but unfortunately, most brands don’t meet this expectation. Gain a competitive advantage by using social listening tools to stay informed of brand mentions and comments, watch your inbox, and be sure to respond to your followers as quickly as possible.
- Build relationships with influencers and industry leaders: Your online relationships should go beyond the ones you build with consumers. Engage with influencers and leaders in your industry by following them, liking and sharing their content, and leaving comments on their posts. Build relationships with them and whenever possible, ask them for endorsements or to engage with your content so it can be showcased to their followers.
Analyze and iterate
Analyzing social media data can help you build a solid social media strategy that keeps metrics like social media impressions trending upward.
Monitor your impressions regularly. Don’t just take a quick glance at likes in shares, though. Take time to really dive into the numbers and analyze them for patterns. Look to see if impressions are growing over time, determine if certain types of content generate more impressions than others, and pay close attention to captions on the content that generates the most impressions and engagement. You can also identify trends such as times of day or days of the week that garner more impressions.
Use this data to make adjustments to your content strategy. If you’re getting the most impressions on infographics, add more of these to your social media calendar. If your audience is responding to your posts more in the evening than in the afternoon, schedule your content to post between 7pm and 10pm.
Remember that social media is ever-changing so iterate this routine often. Download your analytics, adjust your strategy, repeat.
Integrate it with the overall marketing strategy
Don’t forget to integrate the strategy you develop for your social media platforms with your overall marketing strategy. If you’re purchasing advertising time on radio, television, or print media, make sure your social media posts and advertisements have the same look and feel to improve your social media impressions.
As with your social media analytics, take time to track overall conversions and determine what percentage is coming from social media efforts and what percentage is coming from other marketing strategies. Regardless of the methods you use to market your business, you should be tracking conversions and adjusting strategies cohesively. If you need to adjust your print marketing strategy, make adjustments to your social media marketing strategy accordingly to ensure your efforts are still aligned.
You can improve social media impressions to build a solid campaigns across all mediums that amplify your brand’s message and help consumers recognize your brand. This goes for whether they see your client’s brand on television, in print, on a roadside billboard, or while perusing their social media feeds. Once your impressions on social media start to increase, other metrics like reach, engagement, click-through-rate, and most importantly, sales, should start to follow suit.
Frequently asked questions
How do social media impressions differ from other metrics like reach and engagement?
While social media impressions count the number of times your content was seen, including multiple views by the same user, reach measures how many individual users have seen your content and engagement measures how many have interacted with it through liking, sharing, or commenting on your content.
Are there any tools or software that can help me track and analyze my social media impressions?
Third-party social media management tools like Social Marketing by Vendasta can help you track important metrics like social media impressions, reach, and engagement while giving you an all-in-one solution that enables you to manage multiple social media accounts on multiple platforms in a single place.