686 - Why Likes Do Not Lead to Sales
Jens Heitland explains why likes, shares, and views show little connection to sales, and how a relationship engine such as a CEO podcast builds the trust that moves a business forward. Drawing on recent work in corporate thought leadership, he describes how trust transfers between host, guest and audience, and why relationship progress matters more than the numbers on a dashboard.
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Visibility Works When It Builds Relationships
Every morning, leaders and their communication teams open a dashboard and look at the same set of numbers. Likes, shares, impressions, and views arrive neatly organized, with arrows pointing up or down compared to the day before. The appeal is easy to understand. These figures are immediate, visible, and simple to report, and over time they start to feel like the measure of whether visibility is working.
Recently we sat down with a company where we run corporate thought leadership to look at the metrics that truly drive their business. The conversation moved quickly away from the dashboard. In the end, what sustains the company is selling products and services. When we looked for a link between the reach of individual posts and the revenue that followed, we could not find one. Posts with high engagement did not lead to more business, and quieter posts did not mean nothing was happening.
Instead, the data pointed to the strength of relationships. In my experience, visibility creates value when it places one person credibly alongside another. A podcast where one CEO speaks with another CEO works in exactly that way. I think of it as a relationship engine. The audience that already knows and trusts the host extends some of that trust to the guest, and the guest's own network does the same in return. Both people leave the conversation more trusted than they entered, and that trust travels well beyond the people who happened to press a button under a post.
The engine runs on proximity. Two leaders sitting in the same room, speaking openly about how they think, create something that a single post cannot replicate. The recording becomes a reason to reconnect, a reference point in future meetings, and a signal to others that this person is worth knowing. None of that appears on a dashboard, yet it often moves the business forward.
Problems tend to appear when organizations measure the wrong thing for long enough. Teams start shaping content around what performs on the screen. Leaders compare today's numbers with yesterday's and feel uneasy when the line flattens. Content becomes louder and more frequent, while trust-building conversations are scheduled less often. Over time, the goal quietly shifts from building trust with the right people to attracting attention from as many people as possible. The result can look healthy in a monthly report while the relationships that matter receive less care than they deserve.
The shift is rarely intentional. Engagement metrics are simply the easiest thing to count, and what is easy to count tends to become what gets managed. Relationship progress is harder to see. It shows up in a returned call, a warmer introduction, an invitation that arrives unrequested, or a conversation that picks up exactly where the last one ended.
Likes and views still carry some meaning. They indicate whether content reaches people and whether the message is clear enough to be noticed. They become a much smaller signal, however, once an organization sees visibility as a way to build relationships. The question worth asking shifts from how many people saw something to whether the right relationships moved forward because of it.
Over time, the leaders who see the strongest results from visibility tend to measure it the way they would measure any relationship. They pay attention to depth, consistency, and trust, and they give those things the patience they require.
Highlights:
00:00 Vanity Metrics Trap
00:11 What Actually Drives Sales
00:40 Build a Relationship Engine
00:59 Trust Through Conversations
01:21 Likes Matter Less
01:40 Breaking the Stats Obsession
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Transcript :
I love this discussion when it comes to social media. How many likes do I get? How many shares do I have? How many views do I have? And I get all of that because that's something easy to measure. We just had this the other day with a company where we do corporate thought leadership, and we looked into what are the key metrics that really drive that business.
And in the end is sales that comes in. It's products, it's services. And what was interesting, there's no correlation of likes or shares or of how many people view a, a social media post to sales. And what I look into is if we build a relationship engine, meaning in our case, a podcast, that a CEO is talking to another CEO.
You create content, you create visibility, which means you have one person showing up with another person. That creates trust for both people because let's say if I'm on a podcast, the other people that know the podcast host trust that podcast host, and if he's talking to me or she's talking to me, they trust me more than before.
So the relationship part of that is, is way stronger with people being in the same room. That means in the end, it almost doesn't matter how many likes, how many views you get for a specific social media post, even off that podcast, as long that the relationship is moving forward.
Obviously, I'm not saying it doesn't count, but it is less important if you build a relationship engine. and that's very difficult to explain because a lot of people are just looking into their phone, see the statistics, how many likes did I get today and how many likes did I get yesterday?
And it need to go up from yesterday to today.