Reading the Numbers

Every platform hands you a dashboard full of numbers, and almost all of them are built to tell advertisers what they want to hear. A civic writer has a different goal. You want people to know what their government did, check it for themselves and show up when it matters. Only a few numbers measure that.

What each number actually counts

A note on Meta. In 2024 Instagram and then Facebook made Views the main metric, replacing Impressions for photos, text posts and Stories. Views count every appearance, so one person seeing your chart three times is three views. Meta said the math did not change, only the name, but it also warned, as Social Media Today reported, that totals could look higher than old impression numbers. Whenever a platform renames or redefines a metric, compare carefully across the change. A sudden jump might just be accounting.

What matters for a civic writer

Here is where to look, roughly in order.

1. Clicks to the article. A click means someone wanted the whole story, with the documents. That is the closest thing to "this person read my reporting" a dashboard gives you.
2. Replies with substance and shares with comment. "I didn't know the bond was $2.4 million over the project list, sending this to my neighbor" is worth more than 200 likes.
3. Saves on Instagram and similar, for explainers. A saved post on how to give public comment means someone plans to use it.
4. Follows from a specific post. Tells you what kind of work brings new readers.
5. Real-world signs. No dashboard has these, and they matter most. People quoting your numbers at public comment. A council member answering your question. An email tip. A records request someone filed after reading your how-to. Keep a note of these. They are your actual results.

Vanity metrics

Total followers, total likes and total views are the big shiny numbers at the top of the dashboard. They feel good. They tell you little.

A post with 30,000 views and 4 clicks did less for informed readers than a post with 900 views and 85 clicks. A follower count inflated by bots or by one viral joke tells you nothing about who reads your reporting. Likes come easily from people who agree with a headline and never read further. And chasing these numbers pushes you toward outrage and teasers, which is the opposite of what a credible civic writer needs.

Tracking clicks properly

Platform dashboards only see what happens on the platform. To know which posts sent readers to your site, tag your links. UTM parameters are labels added to the end of a link that tools like Google Analytics read. Google's help page lists them; the three you need are:

• utm_source: where the link was posted (facebook, bluesky, instagram)
• utm_medium: the type of channel (social)
• utm_campaign: which story (cedar-gap-bond)

Now your site analytics can show that Bluesky sent 140 readers and Facebook sent 410. Substack, WordPress and most site builders show referral sources even without tags, but tags let you tell apart two posts on the same platform. Use lowercase and the same spelling every time, or "Facebook" and "facebook" become two separate rows.

Remember the link placement trade-off from lesson 2. On some platforms, links in the post body get shown to fewer people. Outside studies of LinkedIn (none from LinkedIn itself) found link posts get less reach, and one analysis argues that body links get far more clicks than links buried in comments. If clicks are what you measure, sometimes lower reach with more clicks is the better deal.

A monthly review that takes 30 minutes

Daily numbers bounce around on noise: time of day, what else was in the news, whether the platform tweaked something. Checking them every hour turns posting into pulling a slot machine lever. Look once a month.

1. List the month's posts in a spreadsheet with platform, format and date.
2. Add reach, clicks, substantive replies and new follows for each.
3. Sort by clicks. Look at the top five and the bottom five. What format, platform and kind of first line do the winners share?
4. Write down the real-world signs from your notes.
5. Change one thing next month. Only one, so you can tell if it worked.

After three months you will know more about your own readers than any guide, including this one, can tell you. Maybe your document posts outdo charts on Facebook. Maybe Bluesky sends few readers but they are all reporters who pick up your stories. That second case would look terrible on a follower chart and be your most valuable platform.

The Article Values Graph at jeffapierson.com/journaltools/ideagraph/ is a different kind of measure, focused on the article itself, and can be useful alongside the social numbers when you look back at what worked.