Impressions vs Engagement: What to Track and How?

While impressions can show how far your content travels, engagement reveals how deeply it resonates with your audience. 

So, which one should you prioritize in your reporting? 

In this blog post, I’ll address how these two social media metrics compare and correlate across platforms, using insights from the Socialinsider’s 2025 Benchmarks Reports.

When do impressions matter the most?

Impressions measure how many times your content appears on someone’s screen, including repeated displays, and it’s different from people interacting with it. The metric helps you assess brand visibility and perception. Here’s when impressions matter the most and why you should consider them as one of the key KPIs for your brand. 

• Audience expansion: If you’re stepping into new markets or going after a fresh customer segment, impressions are a great way to check if your content is actually landing where it should. A spike in impressions, especially alongside a wider geographic or demographic reach, is a solid sign you’re getting in front of new users. But if impressions climb while reach flatlines, then that’s your cue that the same people are seeing your content over and over. It might boost familiarity, but it won’t help you grow your audience.

• Brand awareness campaigns: When your goal is to build recognition, not clicks or conversions, impressions become a key metric. They show whether your content is consistently showing up in people’s feeds, even if they’re not interacting with it just yet. 

• New product launches and announcements: When you’re launching a new product or sharing an important brand update, visibility is paramount. You want your announcement to reach as many relevant users as possible to spark conversion. High impressions signal broad distribution and help validate that your message is landing in the right feeds. 

• Competitive market positioning: In crowded categories, you may not always win on features or price, but being seen consistently alongside (or instead of) your competitors builds credibility. High impressions indicate that your brand is staying visible in the right conversations. This matters when buyers are shortlisting vendors as they’re more likely to include brands they’ve seen repeatedly.

When does engagement matter the most?

Engagement tells you whether your social media content is actually resonating with the audience, and what to do next.

Here’s when engagement matters most on social media:

• Nurture and retain the existing audience: Engagement is the clearest signal that your content is still relevant to the people who’ve already chosen to follow you. Without it, you risk becoming invisible, even to your own audience. You could have thousands of followers, but if no one’s liking, sharing, or commenting on your posts, it tells both your audience and the algorithm that your content isn’t worth their time. 

• Community building initiatives: If you’re trying to build an online community around your brand, engagement is the success metric you absolutely need to track. Comments, shares, and conversations show that people actually care about your content and have opinions about it. 

• Measure content fit: When a post receives little to no engagement, it could be because the content isn’t connecting with your audience. Maybe the format’s off, the message is unclear, or the topic just doesn’t matter to your audience. High engagement is your signal to double down.

• Conversion-focused campaigns: If people aren’t liking, clicking, or commenting, they probably won’t convert through those same posts either. Monitoring engagement helps you quickly identify friction points and optimize your ad campaign’s creative, copy, or format before wasting your limited ad budget.

• Product research and feedback loops: Social media platforms can be a great place to gather inspiration for new product features and feedback. You can use polls and open-ended questions in captions to ask your followers about their opinions. Also, tracking how people engage with these posts can help spot patterns: Which features excite your audience? What pain points keep coming up? What topics spark the most interaction?

2025 impressions benchmarks by platforms

According to the Socialinsider 2025 Benchmark Report, TikTok has the highest average impressions per post across all social media platforms, at 6,268. Even with a 5% drop from last year, it still offers the strongest potential for organic reach.

Instagram saw a 13% increase in impressions, reaching an average of 2,635 per post. The platform’s algorithm is clearly favoring content distribution via Reels and Explore, but engagement is declining.

Facebook impressions dropped by 35%, falling to 1,116 per post. The decline reinforces what most marketers already know: To get more visibility on Facebook, you need paid ads.

Surprisingly, X (formerly Twitter) saw a 207% YoY increase, reaching 1,430 impressions per post. This is likely driven by algorithm shifts favoring real-time and commentary-based content. 

2025 engagement benchmarks by platform

As per the same report, TikTok still dominates with an average engagement rate by followers of 2.5%, holding steady YoY.

Instagram engagement has dropped 28%, now sitting at 0.50%. Despite the decline, it still ranks as the second most engaging social media platform, just behind TikTok. 

That means your Instagram content may get more impressions, but users are engaging less on the platform as the algorithm is currently favoring content distribution over depth. 

Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) both have an average engagement of 0.15%. Facebook’s engagement rate has stayed flat, while X’s has tripled from 0.05% in 2024. 

Even with the low engagement rate, these platforms can still work for your brand when used strategically. 

• Use Facebook for: Community retention (through groups), multi-image albums, and retargeting warm audiences
• Use X for: Real-time industry commentary, event updates, and founder POV content to encourage discussion.

Correlation between impressions and engagement

Impressions and engagement are connected, but they don’t always move in the same direction. Analyzing them together can help you understand what’s working and what just isn’t.

When they work together, you get: 

• High impressions with high engagement, meaning your content has high visibility, and it’s also encouraging your audience to engage with it.

When they conflict, you get:

• High impressions with low engagement, which could mean your content is being seen, but not many people are engaging with it. This could happen due to weak creatives, incorrect audience targeting, or unclear messaging. 
• Low impressions with high engagement, which could mean your content is resonating well with the small audience that sees it. Consider testing new formats, posting at different times, or boosting posts to reach a wider audience.

Platform-specific impressions and engagement benchmarks

Instagram benchmarks: Impressions vs engagement

Impressions

For smaller accounts, Instagram Reels have the highest impressions, but as account size grows, carousels emerge as the top-performing format. 

Meanwhile, static images continue to fall behind, reinforcing Instagram’s shift away from one-off visuals in favor of video and multi-image posts.

Engagement

Among content types, carousels lead with an average engagement rate of 0.55%, thanks to their interactive, swipeable nature. Reels now have an average engagement of 0.50%, while static images are at 0.45%. Seasonality also plays a role, with engagement peaking in Q4-Q1 and dipping during the summer.

Facebook benchmarks: Impressions vs engagement

Impressions 

Albums generate the highest number of impressions on Facebook, followed by videos and single image posts. For accounts with over 100,000 followers, albums average 1,153 impressions per post. The number drops to just 145 for accounts with fewer than 5,000 followers.

Engagement

While Facebook’s average engagement rate remains steady at 0.15%, smaller pages, especially those with under 5K followers, tend to perform better with an average of 0.30%.

Photo albums pull the highest engagement on Facebook. Their story-like format encourages more interaction as users browse through multiple images. 

Tiktok benchmarks: Impressions vs engagement

Impressions

On TikTok, larger accounts consistently get the most views. As follower count increases, average views per post grow sharply, especially beyond the 100K mark. This trend proves that follower count isn’t just a vanity metric on TikTok; it’s a direct indicator of organic reach.

Engagement

TikTok leads all platforms in engagement, possibly driven by a digitally native younger audience. 

While the average TikTok engagement rate by views is 3.85%, accounts with fewer than 5K followers have an average of 4.2%.

That’s because the content from smaller accounts often feels more personal and relatable. Larger accounts have higher reach, but the overall content-to-engagement ratio is lower. 

LinkedIn benchmarks: Impressions vs engagement

Impressions

In 2025, polls are dominating impressions on LinkedIn, and they are outperforming every other content format by a wide margin. When tied to trending topics or bold opinions, polls can be a great way to gain visibility on the platform. 

But interestingly, for smaller accounts with less than 5k followers, native documents get the highest impressions, followed by multi-image posts and polls.

Text-only posts get the fewest impressions.

Engagement

Multi-image posts have the highest LinkedIn engagement at 6.6%. Native documents follow closely at 6.1%, offering a format that invites users to slow down and engage with in-depth content. 

Videos have seen a major jump in engagement and now stand at 5.6%. Meanwhile, text-only posts remain the weakest performers at just 4%.

What are the best tools for impressions and engagement measurement?

There are two ways to measure impressions and engagement for your social media channels: You can either check the native analytics available on each platform, or you can use a cross-channel social media analytics tool that lets you analyze data across all the different platforms. Both of these have their own pros and cons. Let’s take a look. 

Native platform analytics

Most platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn, offer native analytics dashboards where you can view your profile’s performance data from the past few months. These dashboards are useful for checking quick performance snapshots. 

But these tools have some limitations:

• Historical insights usually max out at 30-90 days 
• Custom reporting options are minimal
• With limited historical data, exports are also limited, which makes it difficult to build long-term trend reports

Third-party analytics tools

For seamless cross-platform analytics, consider third-party tools like Socialinsider that offer the flexibility marketers need.

Socialinsider is a social media analytics and competitive benchmarking tool that pulls real-time and historical data from all the major social media platforms to help you uncover trends, compare performance, and identify what truly works.

With Socialinsider, you get:

• Cross-platform analytics for LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and more–all in one dashboard

• Deeper metrics for engagement and impressions, content-type breakdowns, and best times to post

• Access to extended historical data for year-over-year benchmarking
• Automated and customized reporting to streamline monthly and quarterly reporting for stakeholders and clients

Final thoughts 

Both impressions and engagement metrics matter when analyzing your social media strategies. But knowing when to prioritize one over the other and when to assess them together is what sets great marketers apart.

Socialinsider makes cross-platform analysis easier by bringing together impressions, engagement, and benchmark data from all major platforms into one unified and powerful dashboard.

FAQs about impressions vs engagement

1. Which is better, impressions or engagement?

Well, it depends on your goals. Impressions are great for tracking how often your content is being seen. Engagement, on the other hand, measures how people are responding to your content through likes, comments, shares, or clicks. Track impressions for brand awareness and engagement for conversion-focused campaigns. You can also track both to understand how visible and effective your content really is.

2. How many impressions are good on each platform?

There’s no universal benchmark for ’good’ impressions. It depends on your account size, industry, and the platform you’re using. For example, TikTok averages over 6,000 impressions per post, while Instagram averages around 2,600. Instead of chasing a fixed number, check the benchmarks specific to your industry and follower range for each platform. Focus on how your impressions trend over time, and how they compare to reach and engagement to get a clearer picture of performance.