Impressions and reach are two common social media metrics that a lot of businesses use to evaluate their social media performance, but oftentimes, it is easy to get the two mixed up. Here we explain the difference between these two metrics and understand their significance in evaluating social media performance. 

Impressions count the number of times that your social media has been viewed or seen by individuals. This means that the impressions would count both times if the same individual has viewed your social media post twice. Impressions are a great measure to evaluate brand awareness and traffic onto your page because if your impressions are declining, this could indicate that your target audience is not enjoying the content that you are producing or that your content does not align or fit with the platform’s culture. Therefore, it is important to possibly change your social media strategy to bring your impressions count up. 

Reach on the other hand is measuring the number of unique individuals that have seen your post. This means that reach would only count once for repeated viewers of the same post. It is also possible that you put up a post, and it will not be viewed by some people. Reach is critical to assess your brand visibility because the higher the reach of your post indicates more unique individuals are aware of your content. Instagram also keeps track of individuals you have reached but are not currently following your page, so you can take a deeper dive at those individuals and build a customer avatar to gauge a better understanding of who your target audience comprises.