Your best post is not doing what you think
Two viral posts, and the number I'd been ignoring.
Two months ago my LinkedIn inbox filled up. People I hadn’t spoken to in years, writing to tell me they’d seen the map everywhere.
It was a map of Spain. Every block, 0.1% of the population.
The follower count moved too. From the outside, it looked like something had happened.
118,712 impressions. 124 new followers.
I sat with those two numbers for a while.
98% of that reach was out of network. Which is a polite way of saying the algorithm carried it to strangers, and the algorithm can stop carrying it whenever it decides to.
Last September, a linear regression cheatsheet on X did something similar. 128,000 impressions. 11,533 interactions.
349 people expanded the post to actually look at the diagram.
That’s the one that stayed with me.
It was a cheatsheet. Being read was the entire point of it. Eleven thousand people engaged with something fewer than four hundred opened.
Surely the reach is still worth something?
Something. Not what we think it is.
Roughly a quarter of a million impressions across two posts. 124 followers. 349 people who looked at the thing I actually made.
Reach is a crowd walking past a window. An audience is whoever came inside.
Impressions are rented. They arrive because an algorithm moved them, and they leave the same way. You don’t own a single one of them.
This list is around 9,500 people. Every one of them typed an email address and pressed a button. Nobody subscribes by accident.
The number that matters is not who saw it. It’s who came back without being asked.
So I stopped checking impressions. I check opens now. That number moves slowly; it looks small next to 118,712, and nobody screenshots it.
It’s also the only one that has ever turned into anything real.
Anyone can be seen. Almost nobody gets returned to.
— Josep
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