A like means someone approved. A save means someone plans to come back.

Likes used to be the headline engagement metric, but recent ranking updates have shifted real algorithmic weight toward shares and saves instead — both are treated as stronger signals of genuine value than a like, which costs a viewer almost nothing to give.

The distinction makes intuitive sense once you sit with it: a like says 'I approve of this.' A save says 'I want this again later' — a recipe, a stat, a specific phrasing worth reusing. A share says 'someone else in my life needs to see this,' which is a viewer vouching for the content with their own reputation.

That has a real effect on what kind of content is worth prioritizing in an edit. Purely entertaining clips can still earn plenty of likes without earning many saves or shares; clips built around a genuinely useful, specific, reusable piece of information — a step-by-step, a comparison, a number worth remembering — tend to earn the save-and-share behavior that actually moves distribution now.

Worth checking directly: pull the save and share counts on your last dozen clips, not just views and likes. The pattern in which topics earn saves versus which just earn likes is usually more instructive than any single virality score.