Comments, Shares and Likes are not the same
There is a meme that lives in most product management case interview instructional videos that likes, shares, and comments should be grouped together to form a single form of engagement, usually called “interactions”. I don’t recommend you do this.
The reason is that each of these actions have very different meanings and implications:
Like. Someone has, with a single click, indicated that they liked a piece of content. This provides a clear signal that the content is relevant to them and had a positive experience with it. It’s useful for making the app successful because it helps provide signal to a recommendation engine for making the app relevant to all users.
Comment. Someone has spent time to write something about a piece of content. This indicates relevance but does not mean a user had a positive experience with it. Commenting is great because it creates additional content that other users find engaging and can make other users spend more time on the app.
Shares. Someone sent a piece of content to someone else. This indicates relevance and could mean that the user had a positive experience with it. Sharing is powerful because it multiplies the reach of a content and drives virality.
If you are trying to explain why behaviors matter, treating them all as one bucket glosses over these very significant differences.
Worse, if you treat these behaviors as one and try to make a metric from them as a group, your metric will be hard to define or interpret. How can you compare the value of a share versus a like? Do you create some weighted average?
Forget bucketing. Just track each metric separately and avoid the pain. Take the time to explain each behavior separately and define a metric for each one. This will keep things clear both in terms of measurement and demonstrate your understanding of their respective benefits.
