Social impressions are the number of times a post has been displayed in a timeline, whether the post is clicked on, or not. In other words, it’s an estimate of how many times people have most likely seen or been exposed to a piece of content. This is a standard reporting metric used within marketing and insight teams, and one of the main reasons for this is that this metric is very easy to interpret.

As the name suggests, Social Impressions is a metric available for all social platforms (X, Facebook, Instagram), and other online sources, such as Blogs, Forums and Reviews. The alternative to this for Media Monitoring is called Media Reach.

Pulsar derives Social Impressions from the potential amount of times your post has appeared in a timeline, giving you an indication of how large your potential exposure might be. This metric takes into account the number of followers the account has. Now, imagine someone like @BarackObama with an audience size of 100+ million followers on X tweeting something - the Social Impressions for that tweet will be insane!

On TRAC, Social Impressions are calculated by looking at the audience size and the amount of engagements generated by that post. For some channels, where we currently do not have information on the audience size, for example YouTube, we are unable to give an estimate on the number of Potential Impressions.

Actual Estimated Impressions (AEI) has been deprecated as of July 2024, and Pulsar will display only the number of potential impressions as Social Impressions in the platform, as we want to simplify and further streamline our metrics, therefore simplifying the way you analyse your data.

For X Social Impressions, we take into account the sum of the author's followers.

For Instagram Social Impressions, this is based on the number of Likes the post has received and then we add a likes multiplier to estimate the audience size, as we do not have follower information from the hashtags APIs, so our multiplier is based on a study that says that for every 1k followers, you get 37 likes on average. You can read more about it here.

For Reddit Social Impressions, we take into account the number of the subreddit's subscribers, upvotes, i.e likes, plus the number of comments left on that post.

We look at the estimated daily visitor count for those websites, based on Alexa ranking, and if available we also factor in the number of times the url for that review, blog or forum post has been shared on Facebook, which we call "Social Shares".

For Facebook data we look at the number of page followers plus the number of total engagements on the post.

The Social Impressions count mirrors the views count for Twitch content.

We calculate Pinterest's impressions based on the profile's follower count and the number of engagements.

We calculate Discord's impressions based on the server size and the number of replies to the comment (if the comment was a Thread)