You post something. It does well. You post something similar. It flops. You spend the next forty minutes staring at your phone trying to work out what changed. Instagram’s own chief has finally explained what to look at instead.
What Did Instagram’s Boss Say About Engagement Rates?
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, shared new guidance this week on how to use the platform’s content performance insights, covering which data points are relevant to different types of engagement.
The short version: reach is the wrong metric to obsess over. If you want to understand why a post got more or less reach, focus on engagement rates instead.
Engagement rate is the proportion of people who saw your post and did something with it. Liked it. Commented. Saved it. Sent it to someone. That ratio is what tells you whether your content is landing.
Why Instagram Builds Reach From Engagement, Not the Other Way Around
Higher engagement signals to the platform’s ranking systems that content is more relevant, which can increase distribution. Engagement includes likes, comments, saves, shares, and watch time.
This is the mechanism. More engagement tells the algorithm that more people might want to see it. The post gets pushed further. Reach increases as a result of engagement driving it – reach is the outcome, not the input.
Mosseri also drew a distinction between connected and unconnected reach. Connected reach is followers who see a post. Unconnected reach is non-followers. The engagement signals that matter vary depending on which group you are trying to influence – like rates matter more for your followers, and send rates matter more for those who do not follow you.
So if your goal is to deepen the relationship with people who already follow you, likes are a meaningful signal. If your goal is to grow beyond your existing audience, shares and sends are what move the needle. Those are two different objectives, and measuring the wrong one explains a lot of frustrating months.
What Instagram Engagement Data Means for Small Business Accounts
Most small business accounts track whether their reach is up or down week on week. That number shifts constantly and is affected by factors outside your control – time of day, what else is in the feed, whether Instagram is testing a new format. It is not a reliable feedback signal.
Engagement rate is. Stronger engagement from followers increases the likelihood of content being shown more widely within follower feeds. A post with 300 views and 40 saves is performing better than a post with 2,000 views and 12 saves. One is telling Instagram something. The other is not.
Instagram’s feed ranking is based on interaction patterns, meaning users may not always see posts from accounts they follow if they do not engage regularly with them. This has a direct implication for consistency: if someone follows you but never interacts, your posts will gradually stop appearing in their feed. Size of following is a vanity figure. Depth of engagement drives distribution.
The second practical point is about saves. Saves are a private action – no one sees them except you. They carry no vanity value. They are also one of the strongest signals available, because a save means someone found your content useful enough to return to. Content that answers a specific question, solves a problem, or gives someone something to reference later is more valuable to the algorithm than content that gets a smile before the scroll continues.
Should You Change How You Measure Instagram Performance?
Stop looking at reach first. Pull up your last ten posts and check the engagement rate on each one – total engagements divided by total reach, expressed as a percentage. Most platforms show this in insights automatically. Look at which posts have the highest rates, identify what they have in common, and build from there.
Then look at saves separately. Posts with a high save rate show you the content type to repeat. Nothing saved in three months is a content brief.
Mosseri posts regularly on his personal Instagram as a way of staying connected with creators and giving transparency into how the platform ranks content. The advice has been available for a while. Most accounts just have not applied it yet.
The accounts still reporting total reach as their primary Instagram KPI are measuring the wrong thing. Reach is where you end up. Engagement is what gets you there.
