What motivates you to keep posting on social media? Likes? Comments? Views? The delightful things we call ‘vanity metrics’? But they are just that – vanity. While your ego might benefit from bragging about your 10,000 followers, you can’t necessarily say that means your content is important to all of those 10,000 people. And you can also brag about how many people saw or liked your post, but it doesn’t mean that the right people were seeing your post and took your message to heart. 

Vanity metrics were once a huge motivator for people – both personally and professionally. These days, more and more social media users are seeing this as a flashback to the high school popularity contest. And ain’t no one got time for that. Especially when you are busy building your business. These kinds of metrics don’t relay any kind of information about how valuable your audience perceives your content to be. 

Thank heavens Instagram noticed this popularity contest and decided to do something about it. 

Keeping Up With the Metrics Game

Saves are the new likes. We’re ditching vanity metrics for success metrics. Yes, write that term down in your buzz word booklet. Success metrics.  

The ‘Save’ feature has been around for about two years, but it is only now starting to get real traction as part of the Insta-algorithm. Saving is a super easy action; all you have to do is hit the bookmark symbol on the far right under any post to save a post. You can create collections of your saved posts as well – think recipes, workout hacks, jewellery you want, post ideas, things that make you laugh…pretty much anything you want to be able to find quickly again in the future.   

Create Content People Want to Save, Not Just Like

The best way for you to think about creating content that your target audience would save is to think about what kind of content YOU would save. Not necessarily topic-wise, but what style of posts – videos, demonstrations, tips, features, stories, etc, etc. Next, look at the Insights of your individual posts and see which ones have been saved already. This will help you understand what kind of content your audience is finding valuable enough to go back to. (To see your saves, go to your profile page and click on your most recent post. Underneath the image in blue text it says “View insights”. Tap on that and you will see a counter for your likes, comments, shares, and saves. Keep scrolling down through your posts to look at each individually.) 

When people save your content it lets Instagram know that your post is important. And when your post is important, it gets higher priority to show up in other people’s feed.  

How do you actually create this kind of content? Images that are educational or are an infographic style are most likely to be saved for later so people can reread and process what you are sharing.  If what you have created is visually fun, has an important lesson, or is even something as shareable as a quote, you’ll have a higher chance that your post will be saved. Content that retains its relevance over time is a great way to think about it. One of our most saved posts is our content calendar download we created last year. Think in terms of Evergreen content in a way that will most serve your audience. 

Another great tip for creating saveable content is micro blogging. This means writing captions that are longer and engaging. No more “Cute sunset!” types of posts; you want to share something personal, something engaging, and something your audience will want to reflect on later to learn from. If you can create content that your audience will want to refer to over and over again, you’ll win the analytics game…for now, until they change it again. 

The most straightforward way to increase your saves, though? Put it in your call to action! Let your audience know that what you have is something they definitely want to reread later. 

Are you following us on Instagram?? You can follow us here or simply search for @defineanddesign.co the next time you are scrolling. And don’t forget to save some of our posts!