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Not sure about your social media terminology? Jumbled over jargon? Here’s a good guide on the basics…our thanks to the very social-savvy Jason Falls!

Impression – Is the number of times your content is displayed. An impression means that content was delivered to someone’s feed. A viewer doesn’t have to engage with the post for it to count as an impression. What’s tricky about impressions is that one person can have multiple impressions of the same piece of content.

For example, on Facebook a post can be displayed in the News Feed from the original publisher and appear a second time when a friend shares the publisher’s post. If you saw both forms of activity in your feed, that counts as two impressions for the same post.

Engagement – Engagement is the interaction between people and brands on social networks. For example, on Facebook, engagement includes likes, comments and shares. This definition shows the importance of why businesses need to create valuable content for their social community and present it in a way that works for that social network.

– Facebook/ Instagram – defines engagement as likes, comments and shares.

– Twitter –  defines engagement as @replies, retweets and mentions.

– LinkedIn –  defines engagement as the number of interactions on a post plus the clicks and followers acquired divided by the number of impressions.

Following – Number of fans following your account / social content.

Reach – Is the number of people who see your content. Reach is a measure of how your content is spread across various social media platforms. You can think of it as the number of unique people who see your content. In a perfect world, every one of your followers will see every piece of content you post.

Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in and not all of your fans will see every single post you publish. So reach is a measurement of your effective audience.

How Reach and Impression go hand in hand – For example you have 100 followers on Twitter and you send out one Tweet. If every one of your followers sees that Tweet, you have a reach of 100 and 100 impressions.

Tomorrow you send out two Tweets to the same 100 followers. Your reach is still 100 (because your follower count didn’t change) but now your impressions have increased to 200. Why? Because every single one of your 100 followers has seen both of the Tweets you published.

Organic –  This represents the number of unique people who saw your content—for free—in News Feed by posting to your page.

Paid –  This is the number of unique people who saw your paid content, such as a Facebook Ad.

Viral – This is the number of unique people who saw your post or Page mentioned in a story published by a friend. These stories include actions such as Liking, sharing or commenting.