In today’s social-savvy world, consumers are peppered with content from brands, advertisers, family, friends, and, of course, AI fruit-drama accounts.
It can be overwhelming to keep up with everything (Bananito is looking for love again), let alone engage with content through likes, comments, and shares.
Take Instagram. You post a photo: 20 likes. You post the same photo to your Stories: 250 views.
For the average person, vanity aside, lower engagement is no big deal. For brands that have to justify marketing spending to their CFOs, fewer likes could mean a smaller budget next quarter. Should marketers be sweating the vanity metrics? And is there a difference in value between a like and a lurk?
What is a silent impression?
“The silent impression is attention without action: someone who watches, absorbs, and even has their brand perception shifted, but never likes, comments, or shares,” explained Ty Stafford, founder and CEO of Hello Party.
Marketers are trained to look for engagement, but experts argue that engagement can also be passive. Danny Gardner, founder of The DataZone, told me, “Silent impressions are what I call ‘passive engagement’ actions such as impressions, replays, view rate, video pauses, screenshots, saves, DMs. Some of these are measurable, some are not.
Others argue that this consumer behavior is not new but has simply been rebranded.