Social media platforms are notorious for constantly moving the goalposts: tweaking algorithms, renaming metrics, and keeping marketers guessing.
Instagram and TikTok, in particular, have been locked in a long-running duel to outdo each other. But lately, they seem to have aligned on one thing: views.
So much so, that while pulling together our monthly social media reports this month, the team noticed something unusual: impressions are out and views are in, more so than ever.
And reach? It’s still there, but easy-to-miss in a tiny font within Instagram post insights.
In Meta Business Suite, reach has quietly disappeared as a primary metric, recently updating to Viewers. Meta defines Viewers as “the number of accounts that have viewed your content at least once,” including reels, posts, stories, and ads.
Wait a minute… doesn’t that just sound a lot like impressions?
Maybe Meta believes “viewers” feels clearer and more intuitive, helping social media managers and small business owners alike understand performance at a glance. But it doesn’t explain why reach has been pushed aside entirely.
We’ve essentially gone from reporting on Reach and Impressions, to Views and Viewers. Confused? We don’t blame you.
Here’s a refresher on what these broad social media metrics mean:
Reach refers to unique viewers of a post, whether that’s an image, carousel, video or story.
Impressions refers to the total number of times your content was displayed, even multiple times to the same person.
Views, generally refers to someone watching a video for around three seconds (this varies slightly across platforms).
It’s worth noting the ‘viewers’ metric is “in development” so the confusion factor may result in a name change. Meta continues to experiment, as usual!
As social media managers, we’re no strangers to these curveballs. It’s not a regular month without Adam Mosseri casually upending something we thought we understood, or opening Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn to find an overnight update without warning.
Just another day in social 💁♀️
