Reach vs. Impressions. What’s the difference?
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Loading... - Kathrine Palmer
- 20 Mar 2023
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Being able to “reach” your target audience is one of the most essential reasons for being on social media. That’s probably why metrics like “reach” and “impressions” are so consistently reported across platforms. Unfortunately, these two important metrics are also often misunderstood or used interchangeably.
In reality, there are key differences between reach and impressions that marketers need to know — differences that ultimately affect the insights you gain from tracking them. So, let’s clear it all up. Here’s a breakdown of what reach and impressions are, including details on how they’re reported by major platforms.
Understanding the difference between Reach and Impressions
In general, reach is defined as the number of people who see your social media post, while impressions refer to the total number of times that post is seen by users (or at least appears on their screen).
The main difference here is that impressions count multiple views by the same user, while reach doesn’t. In other words, if a post was seen 100 times by 50 people, the post’s impressions will be 100 while its reach is only 50. For this reason, reach will always be less than or equal to impressions.
So, why would you want to track either metric?
Reach is great for finding out exactly how many individual people your content is being exposed to. It’s the most accurate answer to the question, “How many people am I reaching?”
Alternatively, impressions can give you insight into the quality of your content. For example, if impressions are greater than reach, then it’s a possible sign that the post is interesting enough for users to view it more than once. If your impressions far outnumber the number of engagements, though, then you can assume that that piece of content wasn’t engaging enough for people to actually engage with it — even if they did view it multiple times.
An important fact to remember, though, is that each social media platform has its own method for reporting each metric. Keep reading to learn more about reach and impressions on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Facebook Reach vs. Facebook Impressions
Facebook officially defines reach as the number of people who saw any piece of content from your Page or about your Page at least once.
Because ads play a big role on the platform, Facebook explains the difference between paid reach and organic reach as follows:
- Paid reach is the number of people who had a paid post from your Page enter their screen.
- Organic reach is the number of people who had an unpaid post from your Page enter their screen. Organic reach is also split into two different types.
- Viral organic reach counts the number of people who had an unpaid post of yours enter their screen because their friend likes or follows your Page, engages with a post, shares a photo of your Page, or checks into your Page.
