Social Media Analytics

Impressions are the number of people who could be exposed to a message or photo. Impressions do not mean every single person in the number given has seen the message or photo, it just means that up to that many people could be exposed.

 
Our Social Media Sharing uses simple math, assumptions, and commonly reported statistics about social media to calculate impressions and analytics.

Impressions vs reach?

Impressions are the number of time a message or photo was displayed. If a person posts the photo to Facebook and they have 300 friends, the impressions would be 300. Reach is the number of times that photo was actually seen. When a person posts to Facebook, only a percentage of those people will actually see it, this number is calculated as the reach.

How are Facebook & Twitter reach/impressions calculated?

When a user posts to Facebook & Twitter, we gather the number of friends and followers a person has. Posts to social media receive roughly a 30% viewership based on the number of friends a person has. If a person posts to Facebook and has 100 friends, we can say that 30% of their friends will see the post. That would mean this one post to social media has 30 impressions. The same can be applied to Twitter.

How are Email & Text reach/impressions calculated?

Email and Text impressions are calculated based on assumptions. When a person shares a photo via email, they are not hoarding the photo in their email box. We have seen at live events that these users will email the photo to themselves and then post to social media directly thru their smartphones.

Because these users did not use the kiosk, we do not know the number of friends or followers they have so we use the average number of friends a person has view social media. This number is 338 according to research by PEW. We then use the same method of calculating Facebook & Twitter impressions on this same number.

If a person shares a photo via email, we assume they have shared it to social media and that 101 people may have seen the photo. This 1 email share has created 101 impressions.

How are Instagram reach/impressions calculated?

PicPic Social does not gather the exact number of followers an Instagram user has. Instagram does not report this number but Mike Byrne of Optical Cortex reports the average number of followers is 843 and the media as 194. Because this sample data is skewed towards a single data set, we opt to use 194 as our user basis. With that said…

One post to Instagram will generate 58 impressions.

Overall Impressions Calculated

We use simple math to calculate overall impressions. If you received 100 email impressions, 100 Facebook impressions and 100 Twitter impressions, we add all the numbers together. At an event like this, your overall impressions would be 300.