Many content creators on social media will look at count metrics such as the number of Likes, comments and reaches to determine if their content is popular or to check if it is being watched and seen by the right group of users. Adam Mosseri recently announced that total views are now the new counting metric.
Regardless of photo or video sharing, Stories, Reels or carousels – the number of views will be taken into account as the most popular content count metric and that has been reached by many people. View count is important because some people will watch the same content many times, so content creators can later look and monitor this data to either improve the content or expand the portfolio.
View count is also an important metric in Threads. These changes will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks. If you're a content creator focused on Instagram, these new metrics will definitely help.