Twitter: What are 'impressions'?'

An impression is when something is seen but not interacted with. The term is often used in online advertising.

In the context of twitter I would think that a response would be an interaction (e.g. they click on it), post impression. Whereas an impression would be an instance where it is seen but not interacted with.

It doesn't necessarily mean that they've seen it, but it does mean that they've had the opportunity to. Sort of like me during my high school days in Algebra class.

ScribeLady, are you talking about promoted tweets? If so, then an impression is exactly what Arpeggio described.

I have to admit I ignore promoted tweets, though

As Locke and WriterBN say, it doesn't necessarily mean someone looked at it. A bit like any advert you come across while browsing online, it's there you may glance it or not.

Twitter is not something I have experience with, but for graphic banner ads you can increase the likelyhood of being seen and / or clicked by making the advert as compelling as possible. Twitter would be limited as text as far as I know. One of my pitfalls is procrastination, sometimes you are better off going through something to find out it wasn't worth it, than waste time wondering if it is worth it, then you can move on.

Impressions on Twitter are the number of times a user is served a tweet in a timeline or in their Twitter search results. It does not necessarily mean that the user has looked specifically at your tweet, but your tweet appeared in their timeline, giving them an opportunity to look/interact/etc.

Arpeggio said:

An impression is when something is seen but not interacted with.

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Close but not exactly. Some people served the impression might have clicked. So an impression is a combination of (seen + interacted) + (seen + not interacted).

An ad impression is just that the advertisement (in your case, a promoted tweet) has been displayed to a user. It doesn't mean the user read the ad, just that the ad was delivered.

A "click" is when the user actually clicked. AKA "a conversion" or "an interaction" or whatever else any given service may call it.

In more general terms, you can think of an impression like old school paper classified ads. You have your add placed in 50,000 newspapers (out of a potential circulation of 1MM), but there's no guarantee that the reader will read or even care about your ad. It's just there. The "click" is if they actually respond to the ad.

There's no real way to measure if the user saw the ad, or read the ad, etc.

This is interesting. A pretty picture at 1:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plAJXVUgibw&index=3&list=PL2SRSD_nbyVd7oFQQ4zLDRrdxvfz-9-Kj

Facebook does the same thing, they just call them "views" I believe.

I'm sorry, I don't do impressions. My line of work is writing.

scifi_boy2002 said:

I'm sorry, I don't do impressions. My line of work is writing.

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Good point - but you do want your writing to make a memorable impression, right?

Sorry, I couldn't resist the line from Airplane. Of course I want my writing to make a memorable impression.

scifi_boy2002 said:

Sorry, I couldn't resist the line from Airplane. Of course I want my writing to make a memorable impression.

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I know - I was just going for a play on words.

PaulLev said:

I know - I was just going for a play on words.

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Yeah, I just got that. I'm a little slow today, I guess!