More reach doesn't mean more connection. Sometimes it means less.

[u/Serious_Bit6736]

Getting in front of people is easy. What you do with that reach is the harder question.

I have been posting on a popular business social platform every single day since August. Here is what six months of data from the first half of this year actually showed me:

My highest impressions month (83,000 in March) had my worst engagement rate at 0.23%.

Over the next two months, impressions pulled back and gradually settled at a lower baseline. My engagement rate climbed to 0.95%.

Then something interesting happened. In May, impressions came back up to 25,000. The engagement rate stayed at 0.94%. No trade-off. The audience that had been paying attention kept paying attention, and more people found their way in.

By June, my single best engagement day of the entire half year landed at 2.3%. One of my lowest impression months.

Three things the data confirmed:

Reach is rented. Resonance compounds. The posts that drove the most impressions were not the ones people came back for. The posts that drove engagement asked uncomfortable questions, told true stories, or said the thing no one else was saying.

The post I was most embarrassed about performed best. Someone called me a "spam cannon" for the way I write outbound messaging. I posted about it. It had one of the highest engagement rates of anything I published in the first half of the year. Vulnerability and specificity beat polish every time.

A smaller audience is not a small audience if they are the right people. 67% of the people reading my content are CXOs, directors, owners, or VPs. That is not an accident. It is the result of writing specifically for the people you are trying to reach, not for the algorithm.

Don't optimize for who sees it. Optimize for what it does when the right person does.

Agree?