Latest / Social Media Marketing with Fexingo: Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Platform Strategy / Why Brands Are Ditching Social Media Vanity Metrics
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about something that's quietly been shifting across social media marketing over the past eighteen months or so, and I think it's one of the most important changes brands can make right now. Luna: I'm listening. What's the shift? Lucas: Brands are ditching vanity metrics. I'm talking about likes, follower counts, raw shares — those big, easy to grab numbers that used to live at the top of every dashboard. More and more teams are replacing them with deeper engagement signals. Luna: Okay, so what are they replacing them with? Give me something concrete. Lucas: Things like shares to reach ratio, comment sentiment analysis, time spent on a post, and what some teams call 'meaningful interactions per thousand impressions.' The idea is to measure whether people actually care, not just whether they paused to double-tap. Luna: I've seen a few brands talk about this. I think there's a direct to consumer home goods brand — I won't name them — that shifted their entire content strategy around a metric they call 'engaged seconds.' They found that posts with higher engaged seconds drove a 40 percent higher conversion rate. Lucas: That's exactly the kind of case I'm talking about. And it makes sense when you think about how the algorithms themselves have changed. Instagram, TikTok, even LinkedIn have all deprioritized raw engagement counts in their ranking signals over the last couple of years. They're increasingly looking at dwell time, replays, saves, and comment depth. Luna: Right, so the platforms themselves are moving away from vanity metrics. Which means brands that still optimize for likes are optimizing for a signal that the algorithm barely weights anymore. Lucas: Exactly. And there's a really interesting data point from a 2025 study by a social media analytics firm — they looked at over five thousand brand accounts and found that the correlation between like count and actual business outcomes like site traffic or sales was only about 0.2. Basically negligible. Luna: Wow. So if you're a CMO still reporting quarterly follower growth to the board, you're giving them a number that doesn't tell them anything about whether the strategy is working. Lucas: Precisely. And that's the tension, right? Follower count is easy to report. It goes up. It looks good on a slide. But a lot of brands are now realizing they need to have an uncomfortable conversation with their leadership about what success actually means. Luna: I think a big part of this is also cultural. There's this expectation that social media is about broadcasting — get your message out, get likes, get followers. But the brands that are doing well now are treating social more like a community channel. They measure retention and conversation depth, not reach. Lucas: Yeah, and one beauty brand I came across — Glossier has been doing this for years, but newer brands are following — they actually use a metric called 'comment sentiment score.' They run every comment through a simple sentiment model and track the ratio of positive to negative interactions. They found that a 10 percent improvement in sentiment score correlated with a 5 percent lift in repeat purchase rate. Luna: That's the kind of data that actually helps you decide what to post next. If you're only looking at likes, you might keep posting the same kind of content that gets a lot of quick taps but doesn't build any loyalty. Lucas: Right. And this is where the tools are catching up. A lot of social media management platforms now offer what they call 'custom engagement scoring' — you can assign different weights to different actions. So a share might be worth five points, a comment worth three, a save worth four, and a like worth just one. You can build a composite score that actually reflects your business goals. Luna: Yeah, and that's much more useful than the raw numbers. But I think the harder part for brands is actually changing the internal reporting. A lot of social media managers are stuck reporting to a marketing director who still wants to see follower growth week over week. Lucas: That is the real challenge. And it's why we're seeing more brands appoint what they call 'social media strategists' rather than just 'social media managers' — because the job now involves educating the rest of the organization about what matters. Luna: So if a listener is a brand marketer and wants to start moving away from vanity metrics, what's the first step? Lucas: I'd say pick one metric that isn't a vanity metric and start tracking it alongside your usual numbers for a month. The easiest one to start with is shares to reach ratio. It's simple — you take the number of shares a post gets divided by the number of unique accounts that saw it. That tells you how many people found the content worth amplifying. It's a much stronger signal of value than a like. Luna: I like that because it's easy to explain to a boss. 'Our share rate is higher on this type of content, so people are more willing to put their name behind it.' Lucas: Exactly. And once you have that, you can start layering in comment sentiment or engaged seconds. But start with one. The goal is to build a culture where the team is asking 'why did this post drive high share rate?' instead of 'why didn't this post get as many likes?' Luna: And speaking of building a culture — I want to say something about how this show itself is supported. Because we're able to have these conversations without any sponsor interruptions, and that's entirely because of listeners who choose to support us directly. Lucas: Yeah, we keep the show ad-free, and that's a choice we made from day one. So if you've gotten value from these marketing deep-dives, and you want to help keep it that way, you can toss a few bucks in the virtual tip jar at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: It's a small gesture that makes a big difference for us. And it means we can keep digging into the real shifts, not just the surface-level stuff. Lucas: Alright, let's get back to the metrics. So once a brand has its share rate in good shape, the next question is: what kind of content actually drives meaningful engagement? And I think there's a really interesting pattern emerging around what I'd call 'conversation-starting content' versus 'information-giving content.' Luna: What's the difference? Lucas: Information-giving content is like a tip or a stat — something you scroll past and maybe save. Conversation-starting content is something that invites a response. A question, a hot take, a dilemma. One beauty brand I follow posts a weekly 'what would you do?' scenario about skincare routines. Those posts get three times the comment volume of their product announcements, and the sentiment is almost always positive. Luna: And comments are one of the most valuable signals now, because they show depth of engagement. Plus, the algorithm loves them. Lucas: Right. And the interesting thing is that conversation-starting content often has lower reach initially, because it's less broadly appealing. But the engagement quality is so high that the algorithm ends up boosting it over time. So brands need to be patient. Luna: That's a hard sell for a lot of marketing teams. They want the quick spike. Lucas: It is. But the data is clear. A 2026 analysis by a social media consultancy called Kinetic Social found that posts with high comment depth — meaning threads of more than three replies — had a 70 percent higher click-through rate to product pages than posts with lots of likes but few comments. Luna: So the real metric to watch might be comment depth, not just comment count. Lucas: Exactly. And that's a level of nuance that gets lost when you're just looking at a dashboard of raw numbers. So the whole shift we're talking about is really about granularity. Getting down to the level of specific behaviors that indicate real interest. Luna: And that's where the tools are getting more sophisticated too. Some platforms now let you set up custom alerts — for example, if a post's share rate drops below a certain threshold, you get notified so you can adjust your content strategy in real time. Lucas: Which is the opposite of the old way, where you'd just look at last month's report and see that follower growth was flat. This is proactive, not reactive. Luna: So to sum it up: the brands that will win on social media in the next few years are the ones that stop counting taps and start measuring real engagement. And they'll need to educate their teams and their leadership to make that shift. Lucas: And the first step is as simple as looking at share rate today. I'd love to hear from listeners who try it — tag us or drop a comment. We might do a follow-up episode with some of the results. Luna: That sounds like a great idea. Until next time.