What Are Twitter Impressions & Why Are They Important?

Twitter Impressions

Twitter (rebranded as “X”) impressions are one of the indicators of brand presence. If you want to have your business known across Twitter, then you’ll care about how many times your Tweets have shown up in someone’s timeline in a month. More likely, you want your brand known across a certain segment of Twitter.

This means you’ll pair your impressions metric with another metric like clicks to see if the Tweets are relevant.

Twitter has a lot of metrics to track, with Twitter impressions one of the most important. When combined with other metrics, tracking impressions gives you an idea of how far your Tweets have gone.

Twitter Impressions and Reach

Twitter impressions are a metric readily available to any Twitter account with a setting adjustment. If you enable Twitter’s native tools and analytics for your account, you will see activity per Tweet on Twitter.

A small graph icon appears at the bottom of each Tweet and upon opening it up, you’ll be given some data about the Tweet, including impressions and Total Engagement. This feature is available on both the web and mobile versions of Twitter.

Impressions on Twitter is a total tally of all the times the Tweet has been seen. This includes not only the times it appears in one of your followers’ timelines, but also the times it has appeared in search or as a result of someone liking the Tweet. It does not include times someone may have seen the Tweet through an embed on a website, third-party platforms, or via text preview. It only counts when you see it on Twitter itself.

In the Twitter Analytics Dashboard, you can see how your Tweets performed over time. Hovering over each day gives you data on organic impressions, promoted impressions, and Tweets. It is easy to filter by a date range and to see how your top Tweets performed.

Potential Reach is the total number of people who may have seen your Tweet. This means all of your followers plus any of the accounts’ followers who retweeted you. So if you have 50 followers and an account with 200 followers retweets you, your Potential reach is 250. With every account that retweets you, the followers get added on.

However, it does not compensate for duplicate accounts, so if one person follows two accounts that Retweeted the Tweet, they still get counted as two in Potential Reach.

Pairing impressions and potential reach together can give a clearer view of your Tweet. Since it is nearly impossible for your Tweet to reach every one of your followers, your Tweet’s actual reach is likely between your impressions and Potential Reach metric.

Twitter Impressions & Engagement Rate

The ideal Tweet will have both a high impression number and a high engagement rate. Having both means that your Tweet spread far and was relevant enough for people to engage with. The engagement rate is found in Twitter Analytics per Tweet and over time. This way, you can compare how one Tweet performs to the average over the month.

The Engagement Rate is calculated by dividing the number of engagements by the number of impressions. Engagement includes any way someone interacts with a Tweet, including but not limited to, Retweets, clicks, and Likes. You will see engagements and organic impressions per follower and per Tweet.

All of these metrics are important because they give you insight into your audience and its activities.

If you have a low impression number with a high follower count, your followers may be inactive. And if you have a high impression number with a low engagement rate, then your Tweets could use some work. If you have the opposite, then you should try tweeting at a different time.

With the introduction of the Twitter algorithm on the timeline, engagement is one of the factors considered when highlighting a Tweet. The more you’ve interacted with a brand, the more likely one of its Tweets will show up in your feed. So even if you didn’t Tweet at the best time, you may still show up in someone’s feed as part of “In case you missed it.”

Twitter impressions and engagement go hand in hand. Not all Tweets will be perfectly high for both metrics but knowing how to adjust your Tweet content and posting behavior will go a long way to improving them.

How to increase Twitter Impressions

Engage with brands, influencers & followers

This seems like a no-brainer. The easiest way to increase your impressions is to consistently engage. Interact with other industry brands and find influencers. Engage them in conversation and answer your followers’ questions.

Find the top followers for your account and interact with them. You can find this information in your native Twitter Analytics or through reporting software. Once you have identified the top accounts, make it a priority to engage with them.

For engaging with your followers or potential followers, don’t just stop at responding to questions. Converse with them on Tweets they post. The more you engage, the more impressions you’ll have.

Improve your media

When scrolling through your timeline, Tweets with large media items are likely to catch your eye first. Take a look at your top Tweets and see if most include some sort of photo or video. If it’s a link, it’s likely that a preview image was generated.

If you are posting branded content, consider improving your media. Whether it means creating some branding guidelines or hiring a videographer, quality media grabs attention. The recommended guidelines for a Twitter image are at minimum, 440 x 220 pixels (2:1 ratio), and horizontally centered to avoid odd cropping.

Another easy way to improve on your media is ensuring that your blog posts have great images optimized for Twitter. You want that large preview image in the link to be on brand and enticing enough for someone to click on it.

Consistently post a variety of content

Have you heard about the 80/20 rule? This states that essentially 80% of your content should be non-branded. That 80% is a large chunk of content, which you can fill up with educational info, industry news, and conversation starters.

While you are looking for some great content to post, you also need to be posting it on a consistent basis. Without Tweeting often, followers forget you’re there, and engagement drops. And when engagement drops in the algorithm, your Tweets are less likely to be shown.

To get an idea of what to Tweet about, look at your Audience’s top interests in the Twitter Analytics dashboard. Focus on these topics at the beginning and then adjust as you learn more about what your audience wants.

Another way to find topic inspiration is to look at how your past Tweets have performed. See if there are any correlations between the top performers, like topic, style, Tweet length, or media. Try and duplicate the correlations to see what’s resonating.

What Boosts Twitter Impressions?

Impressions, likes and retweets

This should come as no surprise, because unless you have been living under a rock, you must have heard that people buy thumbs up, shares, and views for content on each of their social media pages. Twitter is no exception here.

If you want your tweet to go viral, it has to be viewed (this is what impressions do), liked and reposted. Generally speaking, each of these parameters can be boosted by paid third-party services. However, if you are a novice in promotion, the best thing to start with would be acquiring impressions.

Genuine reactions

The key factor here would be to buy real Twitter impressions, as only these can improve your statistics and make them go through the roof. If impressions come from actual Twitter users, algorithms see the interest in your content and start to uplift your content in the common feed and surely in the feed of people who already follow you.

By adding likes and reposts to the party you will be able to extract maximum benefits without the paid promotion.

Getting a verification mark

Anyone can now get a verification check mark. Is it good or bad? We don’t know. But what we know is that it helps with boosting your content and making it visible to a wider circle of people.

Adding images and videos to your tweets

No surprise that this is a must for the algorithms as well, as multimedia content rules the world today. People don’t want to read; they want to view, read, and listen all at the same time to provide themselves with the best density of consumed content.

So, if you are a novice, we would especially recommend that you add bits of photos, pictures, and videos to each tweet you post. It shouldn’t even be something meaningful, just a suitable piece of multimedia for what you’re willing to display in your content.

What can bring your Twitter impressions down?

Tweet without text

This is not a good idea. Even though videos and photos can boost your content, don’t just post them without any description. Always add your own thoughts, facts, quotes or anything you want to multimedia content.

It will make a big difference to the algorithm, and you won’t have to worry about your tweets statistics as well.

Don’t do this if you don’t want your content to be left unnoticed!

If the center of your tweet is still a URL, write something to accentuate its importance and try to involve people in a discussion around it. But don’t just post a link – it might be even banned, as the algorithms can sometimes perceive it as unnecessary.

Unsubscriptions

Yes, this is a big no for the algorithms today. If the system notices that your account has been recently facing lots of unsubscriptions, it wi perceive your content as irrelevant (seems logical, right?). And even if you are putting up with the consequences of a bot attack, algorithms just don’t see the difference.

So, if you see that there is a problem with losing followers, you can fix that by acquiring some straight away – go to a decent promotional website and pick a package of followers. But make sure that you are purchasing quality service and subscriptions that come without unfollows and from real people.

If somebody reports your tweet as spam

Social media platforms react pretty sharply to any complaints that they get from their users nowadays, so getting banned is a very common thing and it often happens out of mistake. However, if your tweets were reported as spam (especially if it happens several times in a row) there is a pretty big chance that your content will be shadow-banned or banned from your readers’ feeds forever.

Generally, such situations almost never happen out of mistake, so you can simply put forward quality content that wouldn’t be perceived as spam in any situation to prevent them. If you are on Twitter to sell or advertise something, make your content native enough so that people would interpret your tweets as recommendations or interesting notes and nothing else.

Also, be careful with what you are talking about on Twitter in general. People nowadays are very touchy on several topics, and in some cases, they have a tendency to report them as spam too – just to make them disappear from their feed. This is not the right thing to do (there is a possibility to set personalized filters using keywords), but people still do that and you should be aware of this threat.

Why do Twitter Impressions matter?

Twitter impressions give you an idea of how often users see you on Twitter. It’s a great way to measure your brand’s presence (Share of Voice and brand awareness). The more impressions you have, the more people are seeing your content.

Impressions can also offer clues into your content’s effectiveness. For example, if you have a high number of impressions but no clicks, it could mean that you’re not reaching the right people on X, formerly known as Twitter. Or your content might not be compelling enough.

If you have a low number of impressions, you might want to rethink your Twitter hashtags, increase your ad spend, or get new followers.

It’s important to track more than impressions. Your Twitter analytics dashboard does this for you, but you need to pay attention to other social media metrics and social analytics, as well, to make sense of your impressions. Combining impressions with other metrics, such as click-throughs, can help you gauge whether your content is working.

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