Saves, shares and comments on your posts, plus replies on your stories. Reach, the number Instagram calls Viewers, tells you how many people saw something. These four tell you how many cared enough to do something about it.
Here is where each one sits in Instagram, what it tells you, and what to do with it, in five minutes a week.
Where to find them
Instagram shows these numbers on any public account. For a post, go to your profile, tap the post and tap View insights. The line called Interactions counts the likes, comments, saves and shares, and tapping it shows each one. For a story, open it and tap View insights. Replies are counted there, under Interactions, together with shares and taps on stickers and links.
A florist does this every Monday with the first coffee, for the posts and stories of the week before. Five minutes, one line in a notebook per post.
What each one tells you
Saves mean someone wants to come back to it: a care guide, a recipe, a gift idea. Shares mean someone sent it to a person they know, so the post is bringing you new people. Comments mean people are talking with you, not only looking. Replies to a story are private, and they are where the questions come from people who are close to buying.
A bakery's photo of the Friday loaf gets likes. Its carousel on keeping sourdough fresh gets saves, and its post about the new Sunday opening gets shared. All three were seen. Two were kept or passed on.
Are people talking about you, or with you?
Compare your posts with each other
Depth beats reach. A post seen by fewer people that gets saved and shared has done more than one seen by many and scrolled past. So compare your own posts with each other, not with other accounts.
Once a month, put your last ten posts side by side and note which got the most saves and shares. In Insights, the content library lets you filter your posts by interactions, which makes this quick. Then make more of the winning kind. A ceramics studio finds its glazing clips get shared and its finished-mug photos get liked, so next month has more glazing.
What to do when the numbers move
When a kind of post that used to get saved starts getting fewer saves and shares, change the picture before you drop the idea. When comments rise, read them, because the questions, complaints and doubts in them are next month's posts. A candle brand whose comments fill up with "how long does it burn?" has its next post already written.
The number outside Instagram
The strongest sign that people care is not on the Insights screen. It is the customer who orders again. Instagram tells you who kept a post; your orders tell you who kept buying, and counting repeat customers takes one list and a month. A coffee roaster keeps both on one page: the month's saves and shares, and the month's repeat orders.
What CP3® does here
Reading these numbers stays with you, in Instagram's own Insights. What CP3® changes is what comes next. Branded Content drafts posts, carousels, reels and stories onto your calendar each month, and you approve, change or skip each one. When your notebook says the how-to carousel gets saved, approve more of those. Instagram posts publish from the calendar once approved.