You Have a Resonance Problem

Why chasing impressions is a distraction and what metrics tell you something useful.

Let me guess. You checked your LinkedIn analytics this morning. You looked at impressions. They were up or down from last week, and you felt good or bad about it accordingly.

That number told you almost nothing useful, and the amount of mental energy you spent on it was wildly disproportionate to its value.

Impressions measure how many times your post appeared in someone’s feed. That’s the entire story. Not whether anyone read it, cared about it, or remembered it an hour later, just how many times the algorithm pushed your tiny rectangle of text into someone’s scroll.

The metric works like counting how many people walked past your store window. It gives you foot traffic on the street and tells you nothing about whether anyone stopped, looked closer, came inside, or bought anything you sell.

Impressions have become the default metric executives use to evaluate whether their content is “working,” and the whole game gets distorted as a result. People start optimizing for impression-friendly content (trending topics, engagement bait, controversy for its own sake) instead of content that builds real authority and generates business over time.

So what should you be measuring instead?

Four metrics tell you something useful, and none of them are impressions.

Saves. When someone saves your post, they’re telling you this content is valuable enough to come back to later. A save isn’t politeness or reciprocity; it’s a person flagging your content for future reference because it said something they want to remember. When your saves run consistently high relative to your overall engagement, your content has utility. People are using it rather than just consuming it.

Shares and reposts. When someone shares your content, they’re putting their own reputation on the line and saying, “I think this is worth your time,” to their own audience. That’s a much higher-value signal than a like, because the sharer has to make a judgment call about whether your content reflects well on them when they pass it along.

Comment quality. Note the word quality, because comment quantity is a different metric entirely. A post with fifty comments that all say “great insight!” carries less weight than a post with five comments that each add a new perspective, share a personal experience, or respectfully disagree with your take. High-quality comments mean your content sparked real thinking, with your audience engaging actively rather than absorbing passively. That kind of engagement compounds over time.

DMs and inbound messages. Most people undercount this one because it happens off-platform and never shows up in analytics. When someone reads your post and sends you a private message saying “I’ve been thinking about what you said” or “I have a question about this” or “this is exactly what we’re dealing with at my company,” that’s the highest-value engagement possible on LinkedIn. It means your content crossed the threshold from interesting thing I read to this person might be able to help me.

The 70/30 Predictive Positioning ratio plays directly into these metrics. Predictive content (the 70%) tends to generate saves (because people want to reference predictions later), quality comments (because predictions invite conversation), and DMs (because people want to discuss the implications privately). Reactive content (the 30%) tends to generate impressions and likes, because it’s topical and easy to engage with casually as someone scrolls past.

Both matter. The trouble starts when you’re only measuring impressions, because then you’re only measuring what the reactive content produces, and you miss the much more valuable signals your predictive content generates.

Example: I had a client whose impressions were modest, around 2,000 per post, which felt discouraging compared to the creators she was watching pull 50,000. Her save rate was incredibly high, though; her DMs were constant, and the quality of people reaching out was exactly what her target audience was. She was generating more business opportunities from her “underperforming” content than people with ten times her impression count, because she was measuring the right things.

The visibility trap is the belief that more eyeballs translate to more authority. More resonance is what translates to authority, and resonance lives in saves, shares, quality comments, and conversations that happen after the post lands.

Your homework. For the next month, stop checking impressions. Seriously, ignore the number entirely. Track these four metrics weekly instead: how many saves, how many shares, how many comments that add real substance, how many DMs or inbound messages worth responding to.

Map those against which posts generated them, and patterns will start showing up. Certain topics, certain angles, certain formats will produce more resonance than others. Build on those patterns and let the impressions take care of themselves.

Because at the end of the day, what matters isn’t how many people saw your post. What matters is how many people felt it.