The Most Important Metric on Instagram

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri lets it slip in a recent interview.

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A few people sent me this clip from an interview with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri by Colin and Samir recently, and I thought it’d be worth sharing with all of you.

It comes in the third slide in this carousel post, which is incorrectly given the text hook, “SHARES IS THE MOST IMPORTANT METRIC”

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Here’s the key pull quote:

“If you’re trying to evaluate how your [content] is doing on Instagram, I would look at sends per reach.

Of the people who saw it, how many of them sent it to a friend?

That tends to be the content that does the best because it tends to drive the most value for the overall community.”

This comes as a relief to yours truly, because I’ve been writing about optimizing for this exact metric since December, when I shared The Secret to a Viral Comedy Clip.

Only while Mosseri refers to it as ‘shares per reach’, I call it Share PCT¹.

Here’s what I wrote six months ago:

It’s why rather than looking at raw totals (# of Views, # of Likes, etc.), I encourage my clients to look at metrics in terms of percentages to total views.

For example, let’s say you are a comedian who posts a video of a joke that receives 1,000 views, 100 likes, 20 comments, and 15 shares. That video would have a Like Percentage (PCT) of 10%, a Comment PCT of 2%, and a Share PCT of 1.5%.

Even though “only” a thousand people saw it, 1 out of every 10 people who were exposed to the joke went out of their way to signal to their feed, “I’d like to see more of this type of stuff”, and pressed ‘Like’ on the video. That’s wonderful!!

But the metric I’m most excited by in this hypothetical is the Share PCT. 1.5% of all people exposed to this joke went, “Jeff/Stephanie/Arturas has got to see this.”

15 people sent your joke to their boyfriend, or their niece, or their crush in A.P. Biology, or their fantasy football group chat. Whatever it was, something about your joke made the viewer think of a specific person / group of people, and send it to them.

This is what I mean when I say your goal should not be to get a million views.

If you are a comedian posting on social media, your goal should be to get your clip sent in a group chat full of people you don’t know.

Of course, it’s hard not to cynically define the “value” in Mosseri’s answer of, “driving the most value for the overall community” as anything other than “advertising value”, because it means a few million people spent another minute on the platform after watching the video, and watched a few million more advertisements, but alas.

Here’s a link to the full interview with Mosseri, which is well worth the watch:

For the record, this KPI being a North Star metric holds true on Colin and Samir’s own Instagram page, which boasts 242K followers with a manageable 320 posts.

A look at their two pinned videos atop their Reels Feed reveals two videos with not only 59.7M and 15.2M views, but a Share PCT of 1.7% and 1.6%, respectively.

For the record, any Share PCT over 0.5% is good in my book.

If we take a look at all their Instagram Reels posted in 2024 and sort them by Share PCT, it becomes pretty clear that Mosseri is right, and the numbers are correlated:

Their only video to crack 500K views in 2024, an explainer video about a creator selling a YouTube video to Sony, boasts a Share PCT of 0.9% (in other words, 1 in 100 people are sending it to someone else), with a total reach of 3.9+ million views.

Conversely, let’s look at Colin and Samir’s lowest performing Reels by Share PCT:

Candidly, these aren’t even that great of Share PCT’s across the board. Many viral stand-up comedy clips fall in the 2-5% range, and I’ve seen some as high as 10%.

Also, Colin and Samir’s Like counts are private, so it’s hard to know if they are paying to boost any of their videos, which would put further distance between the total reach and any engagement rates. My guess is they aren’t, aside from a few collab/branded posts where the other party involved might be putting some paid spend behind it.²

But overall, it’s comforting to know my recommendations are corroborated by the CEO of one of these platforms, and that I’m not completely full of shit over here.

1. (Total Shares / Total Views * 100)

2. Generally you can tell if someone is boosting their videos with $$ by comparing the percentages compared to the raw totals (for example, take a look at any enterprise level brand, where their Reels seem to get millions of views with only a Like PCT of 2% and like, 12 total shares).