Most advice about social media marketing centers on likes, followers, and engagement rate. If you’re a small business or solo creator, those numbers can be misleading — they measure popularity, not whether your content is actually moving anyone toward buying from you. Here’s a more useful way to think about it, and a specific system for tracking it.
Why you should not base your metric on likes, followers, or engagement rate
If I create a post that goes viral, getting thousands of likes and shares, but doesn’t actually convince anyone to buy my product, then in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a great post. Engagement rate may be high, but that’s a popularity contest, not a sales one.
But if I make a post that gets a relatively small amount of likes, but 3 people comment and then ask you to DM them, that’s a much better result.
The right metric is qualified engagement.
What is qualified engagement? It’s any likes, comments, saves, shares, or DMs on a post that you believe could potentially lead to someone buying from you – this is why it’s qualified.
If you’re tracking this metric on a small scale (you don’t have a budget for social media analytics software), create a spreadsheet of all your posts, with columns for the date of the post, topic of the post, total engagements on the post, qualified engagements (based on who engaged and whether you think they would be inclined to buy), and any inquires that came in via DM after the post (within 72 hours).
To further break it down, sort your posts by intent – what you’re trying to accomplish with the post. For example, awareness posts (designed to simply get your brand out there), consideration posts (designed to get people to think about buying from you by sharing information about your product/service), and conversion posts (designed to get people actually to buy). Then, look at your spreadsheet every month, see what type of posts (awareness, consideration, or conversion) were able to get the most qualified engagement, and focus on making more of those.
What does this usually mean?
It usually means that the consideration posts (showcasing your process, answering questions, explaining why you do things a certain way, what problems you can solve, etc.) will usually be out-performed by either awareness or conversion posts in terms of raw engagement. But consideration posts usually convert better than either.
That means the post that actually helped you make a sale, even if it had less overall engagement than the viral post.
So here’s a practical tip
If you’re finding it hard to make posts (because you’re doing them irregularly, and don’t know what to talk about), don’t think about making a content calendar beforehand. Instead, make a list of questions your customers ask you, and base your posts on that.
Ask yourself: what are the questions my clients ask me the most? And make posts about those questions. It’s better to make 5 posts about real questions that actual clients have than it is to make 5 generic, impersonal posts about random industry topics that no one really cares about.