Increasing your engagement levels on instagram is key to growing as an influencer, but when looking at your statistics, is reach or impressions more important? This blog post discusses the difference between the two as well as analysing each one and coming to a conclusion as which is considered more important.
What is the difference between reach and impressions?
Reach is the number of unique people that have seen your post no matter if they have interacted with it or not. Unless you are putting your whole life into your posts, it is most likely that not everyone will see your content, even after paying to promote it!
On the other hand, impressions are the number of times your post has been seen. It continues to add up if the same person has seen it multiple times. If you notice that your impressions are higher than your reach, it indicates that your followers are going back to look at your content multiple times. Keep an eye on the impressions-to-reach ratio as it will give you an indication of what content your followers enjoy seeing from you.
Now we have established the difference, let's take a closer look into it...
Looking at the metrics at the right times will help you to make well thought through decisions that will help you to improve your social strategy. If you analyse your stats too early, you won't be able to collect enough data in to get an accurate result.
Keeping track of your reach is great if your goal is to achieve a higher brand awareness. The higher the number of people your content reaches, the more people are becoming aware of the brand or offering you have. If you have a business or creator account, you are able to see the percentage of people that aren't following you but saw your post which can be useful to make sure your account is still reaching new audiences.
On the other hand, impressions give you a good understanding about new audiences. It is important to monitor what type of users view your content and then target users specifically with content they can relate to. If your impressions start to decline, it is likely to be because your followers are not seeing much value in the content or, your content is not fully optimised for the platform it is being shared on. Make sure you are focusing on targeting content towards your followers or to those you want to attract to ensure your impressions stay at a reasonable level.
If your reach and impressions are high, it means that your content is reaching the right people multiple times as well as meaning your content is effective enough to get people to interact with it. This will help you to reach new audiences and grow your account.
Understanding your target audience is very important as it will help to increase your reach, impressions as well as overall engagement. It is important to remember that your audiences drive the success of your campaigns so making content specific to them is super important if you want your campaign to do well.
A Brief Summary
Reach and impressions are both two different methods of tracking your performance on social media and work alongside each other in order to give a detailed insight as to how successful your campaign is likely to be. They should be used in order to establish brand awareness, content relevance and platform visibility. It is impossible to improve reach or impressions without the other half and increase engagement, leading to a highly successful campaign.