Ignoring how the likes and followers have been won, for now, for most businesses, an obsession with likes and followers creates more problems than it solves. The pursuit of vanity metrics can lead companies down costly and counterproductive paths.
Misallocated Resources
When businesses prioritize follower growth over business outcomes, they often invest in strategies that generate impressive-looking metrics without driving revenue. This might include purchasing followers, creating clickbait content that attracts irrelevant audiences, or spending advertising budgets on engagement campaigns rather than conversion-focused initiatives.
Consider a local restaurant that spends $5,000 monthly boosting posts to increase likes and shares, reaching thousands of people across the country. While their engagement metrics soar, their actual customer base—people within driving distance—remains unchanged. That same budget invested in local advertising or customer retention programs would likely generate measurable revenue increases.
Audience Quality vs. Quantity
A large follower count means nothing if those followers aren't your target customers and if those followers are not buying. Many businesses fall into the trap of pursuing broad appeal rather than focused relevance. A B2B software company might create entertaining memes that attract thousands of followers from the general public, but these followers are unlikely to purchase enterprise software solutions.
Quality always trumps quantity in social media marketing. A thousand followers who are genuinely interested in your products and services are infinitely more valuable than 100,000 followers who followed you but have no purchasing intent.
False Indicators of Success
Perhaps most dangerously, vanity metrics can create a false sense of security, masking underlying problems with your marketing strategy. High engagement rates might convince you that your social media efforts are successful, even as website traffic, lead generation, and sales remain stagnant.
This disconnect can persist for months or even years, during which time competitors with less impressive vanity metrics but better business focus gain market share.
What Really Matters: Revenue-Driven Metrics
At Luminance Digital Marketing we focus on metrics that directly correlate with business objectives. These might be less impressive in board room presentations, but they tell a much more accurate story about the effectiveness of your digital marketing work.
Conversion Rates
Rather than celebrating a post with 500 likes, we track how many of those likes translated into website visits, email subscriptions, or actual purchases. A post with 50 likes that generates 10 sales is significantly more valuable than one with 5000 likes that generates zero sales.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
This metric reveals the true cost of acquiring customers through social media channels. By tracking how much you spend on social media marketing divided by the number of customers acquired through these channels, you can determine whether your social media investments are cost-effective compared to other marketing channels.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
For businesses running paid social media campaigns, ROAS provides a clear picture of financial performance. This metric shows exactly how much revenue each pound of social media advertising generates, making it easy to optimise budget allocation and campaign strategies.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Understanding the long-term value of customers acquired through social media helps justify marketing investments and guides strategic decisions. A customer acquired through social media might cost more initially than one acquired through other channels, but if their lifetime value is higher, the investment is worthwhile.
Lead Quality and Sales Velocity
Luminance tracks not just the number of leads generated through social media, but the quality of those leads and how quickly they progress through the sales funnel. High-quality leads that close faster are more valuable than large quantities of unqualified prospects.
Vanity Metrics – Do Likes and Followers Matter?
Understanding Vanity Metrics
Before diving into their strategic importance, we should understand what vanity metrics actually are. They are social media or website measurements that look great on paper but don't necessarily correlate with business objectives or revenue generation. The most common vanity metrics are follower counts and likes, but we can also include shares, comments, reach, and impressions.
They're called "vanity" metrics because they often appeal to our desire to appear popular and successful, much like vanity itself—they make us feel good but may not reflect substance.
These metrics became prominent as social media platforms developed their analytics dashboards, making it easy for businesses to track and report on their social media "performance." The problem arose when companies began mistaking activity for achievement, confusing visibility for value. A post with 10,000 likes might seem more successful than one with 100 likes, but if the latter drives actual sales while the former generates no business impact, which is truly more valuable?
When Vanity Metrics Actually Matter
Despite their reputation, there are legitimate scenarios where likes and followers carry strategic importance. The key is understanding when these metrics serve as proxies for more meaningful business outcomes.
Competitive Positioning and Market Perception
In highly competitive industries, social media presence often serves as a signal of market authority and brand credibility. When potential customers are choosing between similar products or services, they frequently look to social proof as a decision-making factor. A law firm with 50,000 followers may appear more established and trustworthy than one with 500 followers, even if both provide identical services.
This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in B2B sectors, where decision-makers often research companies extensively before making purchasing decisions. A robust social media following can serve as third-party validation, suggesting that others find the company's content valuable enough to follow, or can suggest a popularity and strong sales history.
In these cases, maintaining follower parity or superiority over competitors isn't vanity—it's competitive necessity.
Influencer and Partnership Opportunities
For businesses that rely on influencer partnerships or collaborate with other brands, follower count often serves as a currency in negotiation. Influencers with larger followings can command higher fees, and brands with substantial social media presence are more attractive partnership candidates.
While these relationships should ultimately drive measurable business outcomes, the initial conversations often begin with vanity metrics as screening criteria.
Media Coverage and Public Relations
Journalists and media outlets frequently reference social media metrics when covering companies or trends. A startup that reaches 100,000 followers might generate press coverage that a similar company with 10,000 followers wouldn't receive. This media attention can lead to increased brand awareness, customer acquisition, and investor interest—all tangible business benefits that originated from vanity metrics.
Platform Algorithm Considerations
Social media algorithms increasingly factor engagement metrics into content distribution decisions. Posts with higher initial engagement often receive broader organic reach, creating a multiplier effect. While the ultimate goal should be meaningful engagement that drives business results, the algorithmic reality means that vanity metrics can influence your content's visibility to potential customers.
What many onlookers don’t realise however, is that these metrics can be manipulated, in both white hat and black hat ways. Paid advertising on most of the social platforms can hugely increase followings and views, and once the sponsorship of a post has finished, there is no mark left next to the post to explain that the million views the post boasts were in fact not organic.
One can also sway the numbers using techniques that the social platforms are trying to stamp out, using bots and ‘like farms’. Risky, but it happens.
The Dark Side of Vanity Metrics
Finding the Balance: A Strategic Approach
The most effective social media strategies acknowledge that vanity metrics aren't entirely meaningless while maintaining focus on business outcomes. Here's how to strike this balance:
Use Vanity Metrics as Leading Indicators
While follower count and engagement shouldn't be your primary success measures, they can serve as leading indicators of future business performance, providing the original marketing campaigns were established with the right technique and intent. If your campaigns have been accurately targeting relevant customer attributes, then these metrics can give some confidence in future gains.
Consistent growth in high-quality engagement often precedes improvements in conversions and sales.
Implement Comprehensive Attribution Modelling
Modern attribution modelling tools can help you understand the role social media plays in your customer journey, even when it doesn't directly drive immediate conversions. Social media might serve as an important touchpoint that influences customers who ultimately convert through other channels.
Regular Performance Audits
At Luminance we conduct monthly or quarterly audits that examine both vanity metrics and business metrics together. We look for correlations between engagement patterns and business outcomes and offer recommendations to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Moving Forward: Best Practices for 2026 and Beyond
As social media platforms continue evolving and new technologies emerge, the relationship between vanity metrics and business success will likely become even more complex. Here are our key strategies for navigating the future landscape:
Focus on Platform-Specific Metrics
Different platforms serve different purposes in your marketing funnel. LinkedIn engagement might be more valuable for B2B lead generation, while Instagram followers might matter more for brand awareness campaigns. Tailor your metric priorities to each platform's role in your overall strategy.
Invest in Advanced Analytics
Tools that provide deeper insights into audience behaviour, conversion paths, and long-term customer value will become increasingly important. These platforms can help you understand when vanity metrics correlate with business success and when they don't.
Prioritise Community Building
Instead of pursuing generic followers, focus on building engaged communities around your brand. These smaller, more engaged audiences will generate better business results than large, passive follower bases.
The path ahead for 2026
The question of whether likes and followers matter doesn't have a universal answer. For some businesses in competitive industries where social proof influences customer decisions, these metrics carry legitimate strategic value. For most companies, however, vanity metrics should remain secondary to clear, revenue-focused objectives.
At Luminance we take a holistic approach to all your metrics. Organic growth of engaged followers will come with good content. You can target any one metric and hammer it with corner-cutting concepts, but why do it?
If we start with creating a solid content plan then all the metrics you really want will follow. And that includes likes and followers.
By tackling the content first, all metrics will fall in behind. And you’ll be safe from algorithm changes, or penalties that could be imposed for trying to do things the quick way.
Compare marketing from 20 years ago to marketing today and, deep down at the heart of it, there’s only one major difference.
Marketers are still employing the same basic principles when trying to sell something – identify the market, come up with a plan to access that market, get creative with it, amplify.
The major difference comes at the end of that process.
We used to have to hand out questionnaires asking “where did you hear about us?” in order to try to narrow down what was working and what wasn’t. These days we can tell where a customer has come from, what pages of the website they visited, how long they spent there, which channels drive sales and which ones drive browsing but don’t convert.
We have the wonderful luxury of being able to drown in data if we choose to.
But the big problem has now become what of that data is public, what data matters, what data does the client want to see and what data do the marketers want to see.
Likes and followers. The dirty words of digital marketing.
My favourite thing about modern marketing is that as the data has become more and more precise, our approach to it has necessarily become more and more vague!
And so, I am going to apply my absolute favourite industry phrase here… do likes and follower matter?? It depends.