What to measure, and what to ignore

Social platforms supply a great many numbers, almost none of which answer the question you have, which is whether this is producing anything. Worth being precise about what to look at and what to ignore.

The numbers that mostly do not matter

• Follower count. Grows with activity, says nothing about whether any of them will buy, and is the number most easily inflated by posting things unrelated to your business.
• Impressions and reach on their own. Being shown to people is not being noticed by them.
• Likes. The cheapest possible signal, and an unreliable predictor of anything.
• Engagement rate as a goal in itself. Useful as a diagnostic, misleading as a target, because the content that maximises it is frequently the content that attracts the wrong audience.

None of these is useless; they are just not outcomes. The mistake is optimising for them, which reliably produces an account that performs well and sells nothing.

The numbers that do

1. 01Saves and shares. Somebody thought it worth keeping or showing to another person, which is a far stronger signal than a like.
2. 02Profile visits, and clicks from the profile to your site. This is somebody moving from browsing to investigating.
3. 03Messages and enquiries that arrive through the platform, counted by hand if necessary.
4. 04People who tell you they found you there. Ask, routinely, and write it down. This is the least sophisticated measurement available and frequently the most informative.
5. 05Email subscribers or customers you can attribute to it, which is the only number that connects this activity to the business.

A monthly review that takes ten minutes

1. 01Which three posts had the most saves and shares, and what did they have in common.
2. 02Which three had the least, and were they the ones about what you sell.
3. 03How many enquiries arrived from here, and how many became customers.
4. 04How many people joined something you own: a list, an account, a booking.
5. 05Decide one thing to do more of and one to stop. Not five.

What to do with six months of this

Make an actual decision. If half a year of honest effort on one platform has produced no enquiries, no list growth and no customers who mention it, this is not working for your business, and continuing out of obligation is the expensive outcome.

That is a legitimate finding rather than a failure, and the hours go somewhere with better returns. The businesses that handle this badly are the ones that neither commit nor stop.

Attribution, honestly

You will not be able to trace most of this, and pretending otherwise produces worse decisions than accepting it. Somebody sees a post, remembers you a fortnight later, searches your name and arrives through a search engine, which is where the credit lands.

So treat the question as directional. Watch the trend in direct and branded-search traffic alongside your social activity, keep asking enquirers where they found you, and accept that the answer is a judgement rather than a figure. The businesses that get this wrong are the ones that cut the activity because the attribution report showed nothing, and the ones that keep spending because it showed everything.

One page, once a month

Keep the record yourself rather than relying on the platform's own dashboard, which changes, loses history and defines things in its own favour.

Five columns is enough: the month, how many times you posted, saves and shares, profile clicks, and enquiries or signups you can attribute. A year of that tells you more than any amount of built-in analytics, because it is consistent, it is yours, and it covers the period over which this question can actually be answered.

What the comments tell you

The most useful data in this whole subject and the only kind nobody charges for. Several people asking the same question is a gap in your pricing page. People consistently surprised by something is a positioning problem. The questions you get tired of answering are the ones your site should answer. Read a month of them with that in mind and you will find two or three changes worth more than any engagement figure.