What are Facebook impressions and feedback?

If you have a business Facebook page you may be wondering what the impressions and feedback stats are that you see under each post; you can use these stats to help gauge the effectiveness of your posts and how interesting they are to your followers.  Exactly what do the terms "impressions" and "feedback" mean?

According to Facebook's help section:

• Is the impression number the number of users who have seen the post?
  No. This is the raw number of impressions that have been shown to users. These impressions can come from a user's news feed, a visit to the Page, or through an Open Graph social plugin.
• Impressions (or Imp.)
  Ad impressions, or "Imp." are counted each time an ad is shown to a user, regardless of whether the user clicks or takes any other action on the ad.
• Why is the impression count higher than the number of followers my Page has?
  This is because many users refresh their homepage and visit their homepage multiple times during a session, and each time the post is rendered, it counts as an impression.
• What does "feedback %" measure?
  It only measures comments and likes, and no other actions (such as video plays and link clicks). The percentage is computed as (comments + likes)/Impressions.

Tracking impressions will help you see how many times a post has been shown to a user,whether the user reads the post or not; if you're interested in tracking how many visitors click on links in your posts, you can use a url shortener site like bit.ly.  Not only does bit.ly shorten your url's, it also tracks the number of clickthroughs, the referrer, and the which country the users are accessing the net from.

Spend a little time analyzing your impressions and feedback and you might be surprised at the improvements in your posts!