Recently, a huge argument started in Egypt because of some political hashtags impressions and reach weight online — Unfortunately, both sides started to fake numbers and spread wrong analysis, sometimes based on their limited knowledge and sometimes else to gain political victories.
Since the argument started, we decided to not get involved in analyzing the hashtags because sides will point us randomly, however we do not belong to any political view. We believe that it’s our duty to reveal facts behind hashtags impressions and reach, and spread awareness.
We decided to explain a third metric which is “Interactions” which will link all ideas together and let you know what exactly happening online.
Impressions and reach
1- Impressions
“The fake metric as we can describe” Yes, it is a fake metric, because it gives you an estimation based on the engaged persons’ number of fans/followers NOT on who truly seen the content. Plus if you saw the same content twice, it will be counted as an extra impression, however it’s still the same person again!
Example (1): if you shared something on twitter or Facebook and you have 100K followers, so impressions will be 100K impressions, however you didn’t answer these questions: how many of your followers are online at that given moment? How many are really watching your tweets? The answer will be: No body knows!
So please don’t count this metric in, because you don’t know how to count it right!
Example (2): if a certain hashtag appeared to you and you started to watch it, impressions will keep counting for you, however you are 1 person!
2- Reach:
The number of unique people who saw a certain content in their news feed/timelines, this metric is the actual number of people who were online and content went through their eyes (however, they might not seen it) but it appeared in their streams while they were online.
Example: You’re now online and opening facebook/twitter, every single minute there’re dozen of posts/tweets are appearing in your timeline/news feed, but as a human, you won’t notice them if you’re concentrating in something else — Facebook & Twitter algorithms do not know that you’re concentrating in something else, but they know that you’re online now.
3- Interactions:
Simply, how many people involved in the hashtag with a tweet, post, like, comment, reply, or share. People who are interacting with content, are interested in the topic by a way or another “accepting the idea or refusing it”, however people whom aren’t interacting, are really don’t care and not interested. So even if they saw it, they won’t talk about it. Finally, impressions and reach aren’t factors to measure online exposure perfectly, number of interactions yes.
Hope this is useful for you & thanks for reading — Please drop us a comment if you need any further explanation.
