The metric everyone obsesses over that I stopped caring about

There is a metric every founder obsesses over and I stopped caring about it years ago.

Reach.

Views, impressions, likes.

Basically all the vanity numbers sitting at the top of your analytics page that goes up and down for reasons the platform doesn't even fully explain. It is the number most people show me when they want me to be impressed with their account.

It is almost always the wrong one to be watching.

The metric I actually care about is engagement rate. And I focus a lot on engagement quality.

The ratio of the right people responding to your content vs the total number of eyeballs on it, and the depth of what they're doing when they engage.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Every metric that becomes the goal stops being useful, because the moment you optimize for it, the behavior warps around it and the underlying thing it was measuring disappears.

Reach is the perfect example. The moment reach becomes your target, you start writing for reach and use broader hooks or water down your takes or post topics that hit the algorithm hardest instead of topics that hit your buyers hardest.

Your account grows.

But your business does not. You have optimized for the metric and lost the thing the metric was originally supposed to represent which was attention from buyers.

Engagement quality is what reach was supposed to be a proxy for and never was.

Here is what you need to pay attention to:

Reply quality. Are the replies substantive takes from people in your industry or are they compliments from random accounts? Substantive replies from your ICP are the strongest signal your content is landing where it needs to.

DM volume from qualified people. If your posts are working, your DMs get more interesting.

Founders reaching out, operators asking specific questions. That is the metric that converts into revenue.

Save-to-view ratio. Bookmarks are the strongest single signal that your content has specificity worth returning to. A post that gets saved has passed the test that likes and views cannot.

Follower quality. Are the people following you people who could hire, refer, or buy from you?

Or are they other creators, bots, and people from unrelated industries? The right 500 followers is worth more than the wrong 50,000.

None of these numbers show up on the vanity dashboard.

But all of them show up in your calendar and your bank account 6-12 months later.

Pick the right number.

Everything downstream gets easier.

– Wiz

P.S. Tracking the right metrics and rebuilding your content strategy around engagement quality instead of vanity reach is one of the first things we do for the founders inside Mogul. Book a call to find out more of what you could expect for your personal brand