PicPic Social uses math, assumptions, and commonly reported statistics about social media to calculate impressions/analytics.
What are Impressions? Impressions are the number of people potentially exposed to a photo posted via the PicPic Social sharing station or Microsite. There is no guarantee that all people represented in the impression given have yet to see the share on social media. It's an indicator of the maximum number of people exposed to it. If an event attendee shares their photo on Facebook and they have 300 friends, then we'll calculate the impressions as 300.
What is Reach? Reach is the number of times the event guests/attendees' friends or followers saw the photo posted. When your attendee posts to Facebook, only a percentage of the person's friends will see it. This number calculated we refer to as Reach.
How is Reach calculated? We calculate each event-sharing option differently. Here is how we calculate each below:
Facebook: Our research has determined that 30% of your event attendees' Facebook friends will view their posts. If the attendee has 100 friends on Facebook, then one post via the PicPic Social sharing station should reach 30 people.
Instagram: Due to Instagram's terms of service, PicPic Social cannot gather the exact number of Instagram followers from an event attendee account. Third-party researchers have determined that an Instagram user's average number of followers is about 843. With skewed sample data leaning towards a single data set, we use the median, 194, as our user basis. We've conservatively estimated that 29.9% of event attendees' followers on Instagram view their posts. With that being the case, a single post to Instagram from the sharing station has a Reach of 58.
Twitter: Our research has determined that 30% of your event attendees' Twitter followers will view their posts. If the attendee has 100 followers on Twitter, then one post via the PicPic Social sharing station has the Reach of 30.
Email/Text: These impressions are calculated based on assumptions more than their social media counterparts. Our research has determined that the average attendee will email the photo to themselves and post it to social media directly from their smartphone.
Because these sets of users did not use the kiosk to post directly to social media, we need to find the number of friends/followers they have. With this being the case, we use the average number of friends/followers, according to the PEW research center (338), to determine those sets of attendees' maximum possible impressions. We lean on the more conservative side. We assume that 30% of their friends/followers have seen the share. So if the attendee shares via Email/Text, one post via the PicPic Social sharing station has the Reach of 101.
How are Overall Impressions calculated? We use simple math to calculate the overall impressions for an event. If you received 100 Email impressions, 100 Facebook impressions, and 100 Twitter impressions, your general impressions would be 300 for the event!