Sends per reach: the Instagram signal almost nobody optimises for

Almost every piece of advice you read optimises for likes, which Instagram itself ranks below sends. That gap between what people optimise for and what the platform says it weighs is unusually large here, and it is actionable.

It is a rate, not a total: how many people sent your post to someone, divided by how many people saw it. That framing matters, because it means a small account can score as well as a large one. You are not competing on volume.

You will find it in Instagram's own insights for each post. It is not something a third-party scheduler can compute for you — including ours, which reports what the platform returns rather than inventing a metric.

Think about what each action costs the person doing it. A like is one tap, costs nothing, and says roughly "I did not dislike this". A send means picking a specific person, deciding they will care, and attaching your own judgement to it.

That is a far more expensive signal to fake and a far better predictor that the next stranger will also find it worthwhile. It also literally distributes the post — a send puts your content in front of someone who never saw your account, which is precisely the outcome the ranking system is trying to produce.

A like says the post was fine. A send says someone risked a small amount of their own credibility on it.

Sendable posts tend to have one thing in common: a specific person comes to mind while watching. That is worth designing for rather than hoping for.

• Genuinely useful reference material. A table of limits, a checklist, a settings walkthrough. People send these to a colleague and to their own saved messages.
• "This is so you" content. Sharply observed enough about a specific type of person that a friend has to see it.
• Something that settles an argument. If your post is the evidence in a disagreement people actually have, it travels.
• A single surprising fact, stated plainly enough to forward without explanation.

What rarely gets sent: generic motivation, engagement bait, and anything requiring context the recipient will not have.

1. Look at sends per reach across your last ten posts, in Instagram's insights.
2. Find the two with the highest rate — ignore totals, which just track reach.
3. Ask what made those specifically forwardable, and be concrete. "It was useful" is not an answer you can repeat.
4. Make more of that shape. Formats repeat far more reliably than topics do.

This pairs with a general principle we argue elsewhere: track the handful of numbers that can change a decision, and ignore the rest. That list is in the five metrics worth tracking.