Sends buy new audience, likes buy the one you have

Instagram's own guidance contains a split that decides your entire content brief, and almost nobody uses it: likes matter slightly more for reaching people who already follow you, sends matter slightly more for reaching people who do not.

Adam Mosseri, in January 2025, named the top three ranking signals as watch time, likes and sends. He then gave creators a specific instruction that is more useful than the list itself: look at average watch time, likes per reach and sends per reach, not the raw counts. And he added the split. Likes weigh slightly more for connected reach. Sends weigh slightly more for unconnected reach.

So the question stops being how do we get more engagement and becomes which kind of reach does this campaign need.

Two different posts

If the brief is growth, you need people to send the post to someone else. That is a fundamentally different creative job from getting a tap on a heart.

A send happens when the content does a job in a relationship. It settles an argument. It is useful enough that not sending it would be withholding. It is so specific to one person's situation that the sender looks perceptive for forwarding it. Think: a genuinely surprising number, a comparison that resolves a common disagreement, a warning about a mistake people in that trade keep making, a piece of practical detail that saves someone an afternoon.

A like happens when the content confirms something the viewer already believes or feels, or when it simply looks good. Your team on site, a finished job, a milestone, a well-made statement of a value your audience shares. Excellent for nurture, weak for growth.

Most brand content is like-shaped and the brief says growth. That mismatch is the single most common reason a competent social programme flatlines.

Read the right numbers

Percentages, not totals. Sends per reach and likes per reach. A post that reached 40,000 and got 300 sends is performing worse per unit than one that reached 4,000 and got 90.

Average watch time, not view count, on anything with video. Views are close to meaningless as a comparison metric because the threshold is so low.

Track sends per reach as a separate column in your reporting from today. Most agency reports still aggregate everything into an engagement rate, which averages away the exact distinction that tells you whether the content can grow the account.

Then set the target by objective. Growth campaign: optimise sends per reach and accept fewer likes. Nurture or launch to an existing audience: optimise likes and saves, and stop worrying that sends are low.

Ignore Instagram's own explainer page

The about.instagram.com page describing how ranking works still carries a publication date of 31 May 2023 and describes the old four-bucket framing, including follower count as a Reels signal. It is stale, and it is the page most agency decks still cite.

Mosseri's 2025 statements supersede it. If a strategy document quotes the 2023 framing at you, it was written from the wrong source.

The aggregator rule that catches brands sideways

On 30 April 2026 Instagram extended its originality system from Reels to photos and carousels. The mechanics matter.

Accounts are assessed monthly, not post by post. If most of a month's output is reposted material, the account gets classed as an aggregator and loses access to recommendation surfaces such as Explore and suggested content. Follower feeds are not affected. Instagram stated that simply crediting the original creator or adding superficial edits does not meet the threshold.

Read the consequence carefully. Losing recommendation surfaces means losing unconnected reach, which is the thing sends were buying you. A brand that fills its grid with reposted industry content, supplier assets and repurposed user content can keep its follower engagement looking healthy while its growth engine quietly switches off, and nothing in the dashboard says why.

Audit a typical month. If more than half your posts are other people's material, restructure the calendar before you spend anything on creative.

Designing for the send

Lead with the payload. If the useful thing arrives at second nine, the send never happens, because people forward what they have already understood.

Make it about a situation, not about you. People send things that are relevant to the recipient. Nobody forwards your milestone post.

One idea per post. A post covering four points is hard to forward, because the sender cannot say why they sent it in one line.

Give them the sentence. The best-forwarded content implicitly writes the accompanying message for the sender: this is the thing I was telling you about. Content that specific to a known conversation is what travels.

Do not ask for the send. Telling people to share this with someone who needs it is a tell, and it converts far worse than content that is genuinely worth sending.

The honest trade-off

Send-optimised content usually gets fewer likes. It is more specific, less flattering, and less pretty. Somebody senior will notice that likes are down and ask about it, so decide the objective in writing before the campaign starts and report against that.

You also cannot run both briefs in one post. Trying produces content that is neither useful enough to forward nor attractive enough to like.

And none of this rescues a weak offer. Reach mechanics decide who sees the post, not whether they want what you sell.

Pick the reach you need, then write the post that buys it.