Hello fellow social media warriors. I’ve bene noticing a trend for the last several months when I pull my monthly metrics: when my impressions are up, my engagement is down; when my impressions are down, my engagement is up. I can COUNT on it. And this is for all networks, to included when I pull cross-network reports, too.
Anyone else? And….whhhhy? 😅
Best answer by mmoulite
Hi Malorie!
First, I think it would be helpful to consider what impressions and engagements are. Impressions measure the number of times a post appeared in users’ feeds while engagements measure the number of unique people who've clicked, liked, commented on or shared a post.
When your impressions are up and your engagements are down, it could mean that while you are reaching a wider audience, the posts are resonating with them less (hence the lower engagement). If engagement is high but impressions are lower, it could mean that although less people have seen your posts, the ones who do are perhaps more of a targeted audience that is likely to interact with your content.
I wouldn’t classify having impressions go up while engagement decreases as necessarily a bad thing (and vice versa). It really depends on what the goal of your efforts are. For example, if you want to reach as many people as possible, then higher impressions are great. If you’d like to curate an engaged base, then higher engagements could be better. You can monitor both of these metrics (and more) to understand how your content impacts your audience.
Also! If you recently ran a paid campaign or used funds to get an organic post in front of a wider audience, it could also explain the increase in impressions.
I hope this was helpful!
Could be the same engaged folks that always engage? Maybe they love your brand and always like, comment, share, but not the folks that are new and still getting to know you?
Hi Malorie!
First, I think it would be helpful to consider what impressions and engagements are. Impressions measure the number of times a post appeared in users’ feeds while engagements measure the number of unique people who've clicked, liked, commented on or shared a post.
When your impressions are up and your engagements are down, it could mean that while you are reaching a wider audience, the posts are resonating with them less (hence the lower engagement). If engagement is high but impressions are lower, it could mean that although less people have seen your posts, the ones who do are perhaps more of a targeted audience that is likely to interact with your content.
I wouldn’t classify having impressions go up while engagement decreases as necessarily a bad thing (and vice versa). It really depends on what the goal of your efforts are. For example, if you want to reach as many people as possible, then higher impressions are great. If you’d like to curate an engaged base, then higher engagements could be better. You can monitor both of these metrics (and more) to understand how your content impacts your audience.
Also! If you recently ran a paid campaign or used funds to get an organic post in front of a wider audience, it could also explain the increase in impressions.
I hope this was helpful!
It sounds like you have a core audience that likes to engage with your content. As others stated, you may have higher impression counts, but those others are not engaging, and may not. What I would do is take a deep look at those pieces of content that are getting the higher engagement and see what it is about them that’s common; subject matter, content type (video, photo, etc), posting time of day, etc. I’ve always preached quality over quantity. I’d rather have 1000 highly engaged followers than 10,000 non-engaged followers. Also, what type of engagement are you getting? Is it just Likes or are you getting Comments and Shares too? Comments are Shares, to me, have a higher value. It shows that they are truly engaging or want to share you content with others. A like is good, but it’s a low level, low effort engagement. The numbers are helpful, but you need to go behind the numbers and see what’s happening.
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