Most people rely on impressions to judge social media performance because that’s the first metric that social media platforms report on their dashboards. But impressions only count how often your post was shown, not whether anyone noticed or cared.
Instead, try using a metric I created that I call the Connection Rate:
Engagement ÷ Impressions = Connection Rate
This tells you what percentage of people took meaningful action after seeing your content, a far better signal of resonance and relevance.
Let’s break it down:
Post A: 40 engagements / 2,000 impressions = 2%
Post B: 40 engagements / 1,000 impressions = 4%
Same number of engagements. Completely different impact.
Double the resonance means double the insight for your next post…that’s the power of KPIs. If you had judged these posts based on impressions only, you would have been misled. If you had judged them based on engagement only, you would have missed part of the story.
Don’t stop at top-line metrics. They don’t tell the whole story. Look deeper. Question why you are using a KPI. Make better ones.
Don’t optimize for views, optimize for value.
Trend-chasing (click-bait videos, puppies, viral sounds) might boost impressions, but does it help your audience connect with your message?
Want a better content strategy? Start tracking your Connection Rate across the last 90 days (not just the seven-day window most dashboards default to… you can switch that on all platforms). Longer timeframes normalize the data and surface meaningful patterns.
Remember:
Platforms reward what keeps users scrolling.
Your audience rewards what makes them stop scrolling.
This doesn’t mean that you can never post your puppy. In fact, changing it up and getting an impression boost every once in a while can help expand your audience (good news for Rudy).
Just make sure that most of the time you are striving to be visible by being valuable. Post the content that your audience is already telling you matters.
