I made this mistake the first year in my career: I treated social media like it was marketing. Watching the company follower count grow was exciting, especially once it crossed the the first 1K benchmark!
But the reality is, it's not.
Social media prioritises vanity metrics. A TikTok video getting 10K impressions feels like a win to a new social media manager. 10K eyes saw your post! But impressions measure exposure, not impact. As an online native, you see ads every day on Tumblr, Reddit, TikTok, [insert your social media of choice], and will likely scroll past it without thinking about it. I personally can't recall an ad I was ever shown besides that the algorithm shows me an ad for 2 seconds and I scroll past it every time. The act of seeing and scrolling counts as impression.
Pretty useless, huh?
Even bots count as an impression.
That said, impressions are not entirely useless. Impressions are great for when you're working with a social media account or business in it's infancy. It's a great opportunity to do some A/B testing like 'how many eyeballs saw this?' before drafting up a comprehensive marketing plan with a larger budget. You're testing 'did this ad appear on enough screens?' Beyond A/B testing and a young social media account or business, impressions are virtually useless – unless the goal is exposure.
Beyond that, the social media (and the virtual landscape) has changed dramatically in the last 5-years. Social media was viewed as a marketing arm where you could spend €5K on Meta advertisements for a guarantee of some return. Now that's no longer the case. In my other blog post, I talked about how social media was changing and consumers are becoming smarter, and more weary of the current advertising hell that is the internet these days.
'Buy my game!' with a CGI story trailer about the main character slaying dragons no longer has the same ooh and ahh factor that it used to in 2010 when technology was still exciting. Folks wanna see the gameplay. The same applies to advertising the brand new, self-cleaning cat litter box (wow, I really like using cat examples on my blog...)
The goal of social media is 2026 is no longer to advertise to a prospective audience but to be a helpdesk.
The most successful social media posts with high engagement and conversion are ones that teach, entertain, and tell stories. When was the last time you actually watched an advertisement on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or Reddit? We live in a trust economy now (thanks to the enshittification of the internet post-COVID), and digital natives now – pardon my crass language – fucking hate traditional advertising. Buyers are getting smarter, so sales cycles (e.g. convincing a user to buy your product) are getting longer because a lot more trust needs to be built.
This applies to social media trends. It is not worth chasing a trend if you can't do any of the three rules: teach, entertain, or tell a story (ideally a combination). Trend chasing might get you a lot of impressions, but it ultimately falls flat in the face of getting consumers to take an action.
One of the best social media trends I saw was this guy:
These trend worked so well because it had teaching, entertainment, and storytelling built into it! Folks had to stay and scroll several slides to get the full, often hilarious story. And it was a great way to conveniently slide in a product without it coming across as ad-sy. You would say something like 'Mom and dad left me home alone. So I was playing Drop Duchy on my PC when I heard the most horrific, squelching sound from upstairs.'
The reader is engaged. What happens next!? What's Drop Duchy or the noise upstairs!?
Positioning your social media as helpdesk to connect to the audience and to answer questions is the goal of social media nowadays, not to be a neon advertisement billboard. Scaling your social media based on impressions is pointless and a waste of time. 10K followers and 10 buyers is not a great ratio. But 100 followers and 10 buyers? Now we're talking.
Stop focusing on vanity metrics like number of impressions or followers. Focus on the quality of your audience and conversion rate like using bitly which can track where your consumers came from so you can spend more time and budget nurturing that channel.