Social media post figures by network: what you can read

Which numbers a scheduler can show for a post depends on what each network's API hands out, and the answer differs a lot: YouTube reports watch time and average view percentage, Instagram adds reach and saves, Bluesky reports likes, replies and reposts only, and LinkedIn reports nothing for a personal profile. A tool that shows the same columns for all twelve networks is either leaving some empty or inventing numbers. This page lists what Preflight reads from each network and when it asks, written from the code, as checked on 20 October 2026.

A rule worth knowing first: a figure that is missing means "not reported", not zero. Preflight leaves a column off where a network gives no number instead of showing a zero that would be wrong.

The figures, network by network

Three of these deserve a sentence. LinkedIn is the biggest gap: reading likes and comments on a member's own posts needs r_member_social, which LinkedIn calls closed, so no scheduler can show them for a profile, and Company Page figures come with the review that adds Page publishing (see how to schedule LinkedIn posts). TikTok's numbers exist only once the app has passed TikTok's audit and the account has granted the video list permission; before that the column is empty by design. And Instagram's "likes" on a story are Meta's total interactions, labelled that way, because the API gives no separate count.

Comparing across networks, and its limit

The word "view" is not one number. A TikTok view, an Instagram Reel view and a YouTube view are counted by different rules, and Bluesky has none to count. Adding them together tells you how much a post was seen only if you accept three definitions at once. What compares well across all of them is the interaction set: likes, comments and shares, plus saves where they exist. For a fair comparison of Reels, TikTok and Shorts, use views per post for each network separately and compare each against its own average, rather than against the other network.

When the numbers update

The first reading comes straight after a post is published. After that the schedule depends on the plan: a post on a paid workspace, or a workspace on trial, is read every hour for its first day, then daily for the first week, then weekly until it is 60 days old, and after that no longer. On the free plan a post is read daily for its first week and then weekly to day 60. A refresh pressed by hand always asks at once. Because most of a post's views arrive in the first day, the hourly day matters most, which is the difference the plans make here. Plans are on the pricing page.

Reading them in code or from an assistant

The same figures are available through the REST API and the MCP server: an assistant can ask for a post's performance or a summary over a period, and a script can read them per post. The API is described in the documentation and the MCP tools on the MCP docs page. Since a missing field is "not reported", code reading them should treat absent as unknown, not as zero. If you are setting up connections, each network's page says what it gives: Instagram, TikTok, Threads and the rest on the limits table.