Social media can definitely be fun when you’re interacting with new people every day, posting cool videos and hosting exciting contests. But in order for all of the fun to be effective, we have to understand the logistics and jargon. Facebook allows brands to track the progress of their business page through insights, which layout your post’s reach, impressions, engagement and more.
Now while some terms like engagement can be easily understood as the reactions, comments, and shares you receive on posts, others can be trickier. Luckily, we’ve broken down the difference between reach, impressions and page views to help you analyze your reports and apply it to your future strategies.
Page Views
This one is pretty straightforward, but shouldn’t be confused with reach. Facebook tracks the number of times your page has been viewed, whether the person is logged on to channel or not. Facebook also tracks the number of people who hover over your profile picture or the name of your page and labels this a page preview. If the user chooses to click on your profile after seeing the preview, it is considered a page view.
Reach
Reach is simply the number of people who have seen your post. Regardless of your content being viewed by the same person five times, Facebook still counts that post’s reach to that person as one. This is an important number because it tells you exactly how many people have seen your content.
Impression
Impression includes the amount of times your post is shown to people on Facebook and Instagram. Unlike reach, if a person sees your post twice—once from their newsfeed and another from a friend’s message—this is counted as two impressions. Ahhh, that explains why your impressions calculate higher than reach at times.
Now, let’s summarize
Page views show how many people on and off Facebook look at your page. Reach indicates how many unique people see your posts and Impressions determine how many times your content is viewed.
The Facebook jargon fun doesn’t stop here. Let’s break down the difference between a like and a follow.
