If youre still reporting reach and watch time to clients, youre reporting the output and not the thing that caused it

this is the bit of client reporting i got wrong for a long time. reach is the result. watch time is a gate, it decides whether a video survives the pool its already in. neither of them tells you why one post went further than another, so a deck full of them explains nothing and every month you end up writing some version of the algorithm was quieter this month

the ratio that tracks expansion better is shares over accounts reached. instagram doesnt show it, you work it out per post, and the per post bit matters because absolute share counts scale with reach and then you end up congratulating yourself for a video that just got lucky with distribution

two honest caveats before you put it in a deck. the shares figure in insights isnt cleanly dm sends, so its a proxy. and theres no industry benchmark worth quoting, which means the first month you track it you cannot say this is good or bad about anything. you can only build the account its own baseline. i would tell the client that upfront rather than let them assume the first number is a verdict.

what it buys you is a real answer to the question clients actually ask, which is why did that one work. if a post beat the account median on share rate you can point at it and say people passed this to someone, and then go look at what made it passable. if it didnt, the video held attention and gave nobody a reason to move it, and thats a brief problem not a distribution problem.

the honest limit here is that this is one input out of several and im treating it as more load bearing than i can prove. if anyone is tracking it across a few accounts id like to know whether it holds up or whether its just the metric of the month