We need to stop pretending that "Likes" correlate to "Revenue."

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The reason likes feel good but don't pay the bills is that they are a low-friction action. It takes 0.1 seconds to double-tap a cool photo, but it takes actual intent to click a link, sign up for a newsletter, or pull out a credit card. If your strategy is optimized for "Engagement," you're effectively training your audience to be spectators rather than customers. I’ve seen 20-like posts out-convert 2,000-like posts simply because the 20 people who engaged were "high-intent" leads who actually faced the problem the product solves. It’s better to have a community of 500 loyalists who buy than 50,000 "fans" who just want free entertainment.

This is one of the most important distinctions in marketing that almost nobody talks about honestly. The metric that actually matters is "Cost Per Conversation" or "Cost Per Qualified Lead" — not reach, not impressions, not even clicks. I've started framing it to clients this way: a like is someone nodding at you from across the street. A DM, a sign-up, or a purchase is someone walking through your door. The goal of content is to get people to walk through the door. Once you reframe the KPI around that, the strategy changes completely — you stop writing for the algorithm and start writing for the specific person who has the problem you solve.

The vanity metrics trap is real and it's costing businesses real money. One framework that has helped me shift client conversations is separating content into two buckets: Awareness content (designed to get reach and impressions — this is where likes live) and Conversion content (designed to get clicks, sign-ups, and sales — this is where revenue lives). Most businesses only create Awareness content and then wonder why their follower count is growing but their bank account isn't. The fix is to make sure at least 30% of your content has a direct call to action tied to a measurable conversion goal. Once clients see the difference in their analytics between a 5,000-like post with zero clicks and a 200-like post with 47 link clicks and 3 sales, they stop asking about likes entirely.

Vanity metrics are easy to celebrate but hard to cash. A post that speaks directly to a real pain point will always outperform a viral one when it comes to actual buying decisions.

We have been conditioned to think likes and follows equal success because those engagement metrics make the company money.

This is why new platforms that let you put content in communities like Floods TV or the Neptune app are great for actually converting long term users through repeated interactions in similar spaces.

Otherwise you’re essentially yelling into a void with false validation.

No, man, I keep telling my clients (small businesses or even single person businesses) to stop chasing vanity metrics, but it is so hard for them to understand the point. Even when I show them something like you just described, they are still like… but views and likes?

I think that at the end of the day views and likes are the easiest metrics to see and so they go with it.

I get the point but there's a nuance people skip — when you're starting from literally zero, likes ARE the signal. not because they convert, but because they tell you if anyone even gives a shit about what you're saying. I posted a bunch of 'conversion-optimized' stuff early on and got crickets. then I posted something messy and real about a mistake I made and it blew up. didn't convert to anything directly but it taught me what resonated. the boring conversion post came after — and it worked because people already trusted me from the messy one. they're not separate strategies, they're stages.