How Do Impressions Work on Social Media? A Financial Advisors Guide

Social media is an increasingly important part of your overall marketing strategy, and to improve yours, you should know how to measure your impressions. And each social media platform measures an impression differently. In this guide, I'm discussing what an impression is plus breaking down how they work on each platform.

What is an Impression?

Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, whether if it was clicked or not. With an impression, it means that your content was delivered to someone’s feed but a viewer doesn’t have to engage with it. Reach goes hand-in-hand with impressions, as reach is used to define who sees your content.

Seems simple enough, right? Well, how do they work on social and how does each platform measure them?

Twitter Impressions

On Twitter, you can easily view the impressions in the analytics section, so you can see them immediately if you are logged in. So, if a Twitter thread has an initial tweet that earns 300 impressions and then a replay gets 100 impressions, you have received 400 total impressions for that Tweet thread.

As you can see, on the Twenty Over Ten Twitter analytics, there are 59.6K tweet impressions which is a 41.9 percent increase over the last month.

Facebook Impressions

Facebook for Business says that impressions are “the number of times your ads were on screen.” If there is an ad on Facebook, and you scroll past an ad initially but then scroll back up, that will count as one impression. If you go back to Facebook again and see the same ad within 24 hours, that will count as another impression. What about video? Well, a video doesn’t have to be played to count as an impression.

To see if users have viewed the content you post, look under the “Viewed Impressions” section of Facebook for Business.

Instagram Impressions

Reach and impressions on Instagram are separate from each other. The impressions on Instagram are earned from the number of times that a user sees:

• A Story
• IGTV video
• Post

With reach, this refers to the number of unique users that interact with your posts. Unique means followers whose content caters to you based on your common interests.

As you can see, the impressions are simple to read if you simply go to “Posts” then toggle to “Photos,” “Impressions” and a date range and you can see how many impressions each photo had.

LinkedIn Impressions

With LinkedIn, it goes the same as Facebook where each unique view counts as an impression. You want to boost engagement on LinkedIn, just like any platform, and the engagement rate is broken down by impressions and unique impressions. This means that impressions represent the total number of times that your posts were seen, while unique impressions count the number of unique users who viewed your posts.

You can easily view impressions or unique impressions in the Analytics section and then Updates.

Which Impressions Should You Be Tracking?

This depends on the types of goals that you have for your firm.

How Lead Pilot Can Help

Insights give users the best sense of how their content has been performing and how many leads have come from their landing pages. You can find this out in Lead Pilot by checking out your dashboard.

Understanding the Numbers

1. The first analytic that appears in your Insights is “Landing Page Impressions.” 

This shows the number of times a person opened and viewed your landing pages as a result of clicking on a post shared on one of your social networks:

In the above example, we can see that posts on LinkedIn sent 5 people to my landing pages, while Facebook and Twitter posts sent 22 and 25 people.

2. The next analytic in your Insights is “Lead Generation.”

This shows how many landing page visitors filled out your subscribe form and became leads. The numbers again correspond to your social networks:

In the above example, we can see 2 leads came via landing pages shared on Twitter.

3. The last bit of analytics in your Insights is “Email Engagement.”

This shows how many individual emails you’ve sent to subscribers, how many times subscribers opened your emails, and how many of those subscribers clicked in an email to view your landing pages:

The Takeaway

The bottom line is that you need to produce the type of content that will drive engagement. Driving impressions is crucial to your success and higher impressions ultimately lead to increased engagement. If you will be focusing on advertising, then impressions will be the metric that you want to measure closely to ensure that your content is reaching the number of viewers you would like. Reach and impressions on social are both important for increasing engagement, so it’s important that you are utilizing these platforms to best do this.