668 - Vanity Metrics and the Real Value of Reach
In this episode, Jens Heitland unpacks why vanity metrics like likes and followers fail to predict sales, and explains how personality-driven content builds trust with the right audience instead of chasing engagement for its own sake.
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Vanity Metrics and the Real Value of Reach
Working inside large organizations for close to thirty years, I have had many versions of the same conversation. Someone questions whether their social media presence is working, and the question almost always starts in the wrong place.
Recently, a person asked me whether their posts were successful. Instead of answering directly, I asked what the actual strategy was and where the business wanted to be. The answers came quickly: a target number of sales, a target number of conversions. That was the real strategy, the one tied to revenue.
The person returned to the original question. They were looking into social media specifically, not the wider sales strategy. I pointed out that the two were not separate. Social media is one of many channels that support a business, and personality is what makes that channel work. You do not use personality to run a sales pitch. You use it to build trust, and trust is what eventually leads to a sale.
Once the strategy was clear, the vanity metrics revealed themselves for what they are. Likes and reach tell you about attention. They say nothing about relevance. The person had been counting likes and measuring reach without asking who was actually seeing the content.
A business exists to sell something to a defined group of people. Social media reaches a much wider group, most of whom will never buy anything. When a post gets five likes, the natural reaction is disappointment. If one of those five people is a potential buyer, and that person reaches out to the company because of the post, the value of that single like outweighs a thousand likes from people outside the buying group.
Ignoring this distinction leads to a strategy built on the wrong signal. Teams optimize for reach because reach is visible and easy to measure. Sales, by comparison, take longer to trace back to a single post. Over time, this creates a gap between what looks successful and what actually is. An account with strong engagement can still be commercially irrelevant if the audience is not the buying audience. A quieter account with the right five followers can outperform it in every way that matters to the business.
The gap is rarely intentional. It happens because vanity metrics are immediate and sales are delayed. It is easier to feel good about a number that updates in real time than to wait for a conversion that might take weeks. Over time, the immediate number starts to feel like the goal itself, even when it was never meant to be more than a signal.
Reconnecting the metric to the business question it was meant to answer changed the conversation. How many of the people seeing this content are people who could realistically buy from the company? That question reframes everything. It turns a vanity number into a relevance number, and relevance is what social media was supposed to measure in the first place.
I have seen this pattern repeat across different companies and different platforms. The channel changes. The confusion does not. Whenever a business treats social media as separate from its sales strategy, the metrics used to judge it drift away from the metrics that actually matter.
Highlights:
00:00 Vanity Metrics Trap
00:07 Define Business Goals
00:31 Social Media as Channel
00:49 Trust Over Pitching
01:01 Measure Buyer Reach
01:13 Real Value Example
01:32 Key Takeaway Wrap
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Transcript :
The tricky thing with social media is that a lot of people are just following the vanity metrics. Give you an example. So we had a conversation around, "Are my posts successful or not?" Then I said, "Okay, let's break this down. What's the strategy? Where do we want to be with the business?" Then it was all about, "Okay, we want to have X sales, we want to have Y conversions" And that was kind of the sales strategy. But the person was then asking, "No, but i'm looking into social media." And then I say, "Exactly. That's what we are looking into." So if you use social media as one of the many channels to enable the company to sell more, you use your personality, and with your personality, you need to drive sales. And it's not you do a sales pitch on social media. It's all about how do you build trust. And if we look into vanity metrics, what this person was looking into is, "How many likes do I get and what's my reach?" That doesn't connect to sales. It is really important to understand how many people of the potential buyers that are going to buy what we are selling are seeing my social media post. And if it's only five people that like my social media post, but one of them is a potential buyer, that because of that social media post is reaching out to that person in, AKA company, and buy something, it's 100 million times more worth than a single like. And that was a long discussion, but it helped the person to understand why it's important not to look at followers or, like, how many people see my social media post.