There’s a number that comes up in every review meeting. A number that brands check every week, that community managers include in their reports, and that many marketing directors use to judge whether a campaign has worked or not. That number is the like.
And the problem is that, in 2026, the like says very little.
It hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there — visible, easy to count, and convenient to present. But making strategic decisions based primarily on likes and followers is like trying to understand the health of a business by looking only at how many people walk through the door. The information is incomplete — and it can be actively misleading.
The Like Is a Vanity Metric, Not a Value Metric
Vanity metrics are those that look good in a report but have little or no correlation with actual business objectives. The like is the clearest example.
Liking a post takes less than a second of attention. It doesn’t mean someone read the caption, processed the message or felt any genuine connection with the brand. In many cases it’s a reflexive gesture — an automatic response to scrolling. Worse still: the platforms’ own algorithms have steadily reduced the weight of the like as a distribution signal, precisely because they’ve learned it’s not a reliable indicator that content delivers value.
Follower count has the same problem. An account can accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers through giveaways, one-off viral content or bought growth, and have a completely inert community. Another can have five thousand followers and generate consistent conversations, recommendations and sales.
The relevant question is never how many people follow you. It’s what those people do after they see you.
The Metrics That Actually Matter (and That Many Brands Ignore)
If the like isn’t enough, what should we be measuring? The answer depends on the objective, but there’s a set of indicators that consistently correlate more closely with real results.
Saves and shares. These are the interactions that require intent. When someone saves a post, they’re saying they want to come back to it: there’s perceived utility, there’s value. When they share it, they’re putting their own reputation on the line to recommend it. Both actions carry infinitely more weight than a double tap on a screen.
Real engagement rate. Not the absolute number of likes, but the proportion of interactions relative to actual reach. A post with 200 likes on an account with 500 followers is very different from 200 likes on an account with 50,000. The rate reveals the quality of the relationship, not the volume.
Substantive comments. Not all comments are equal. “🔥🔥🔥” and a specific question about a product are radically different things. Comments that generate conversation are a signal of genuine emotional connection or real interest. They’re hard to fake and very easy to identify.
CTR and referral traffic. Social media isn’t the final destination — it’s the channel. The metric that connects content to actual business is how many people click through, reach the website and convert. You can have 50,000 followers and zero sales. Or 5,000 and a funnel that converts consistently.
Video retention rate. On platforms like Instagram Reels or TikTok, the percentage of viewers who watch a video to the end — or replay it — is one of the most powerful signals the algorithm receives. If people stay, the content is working. If they leave in the first three seconds, the view count means nothing.
The Problem Nobody Wants to Admit: Dark Social
There’s one more layer to all of this, and it’s the most uncomfortable for anyone who lives by dashboards: a huge portion of a brand’s real influence happens in places no analytics tool can reach.
It’s called Dark Social, and it encompasses all the private interactions that leave no traceable footprint: the link someone copies and pastes into a WhatsApp group, the recommendation a customer sends to a friend via Instagram DM, the article someone forwards to a colleague by email. When those people arrive at your website, the system logs them as direct traffic. It has no idea where they came from.
According to RadiumOne data, up to 84% of online social interactions happen through private or non-trackable channels. 84%. That means a very significant proportion of the real conversations about your brand, the recommendations that build trust and the purchase decision processes are happening exactly where your metrics aren’t looking.
A brand can publish content that generates very few public likes and yet be shared widely in private groups, recommended in WhatsApp conversations between professionals and cited in meetings. That activity doesn’t show up in the weekly report. But it’s real, and it has direct business consequences.
What This Means for Your Content Strategy
The mindset shift this requires is not a small one. For years, the logic of social media has been built around public visibility: more likes, more reach, more followers. A logic that favours spectacular, polarising content designed for fast approval.
But if what really matters is saves, private shares, genuine conversation and conversion, the question you need to ask when creating content is different: will this be useful to someone? Will they want to share it with someone they trust? Does it answer a real question or offer something they can’t find elsewhere?
The content that travels privately — the kind that gets forwarded from group to group, that people save to reread — tends to be clear, concrete and genuinely useful. Not the kind that chases mass approval, but the kind that builds trust in one-to-one contexts.
And that difference, though intangible and hard to measure, is exactly what separates a digital presence that builds a brand from one that simply accumulates numbers.
Measure Better to Decide Better
The goal isn’t to stop looking at metrics. It’s to look at the right ones.
A solid measurement framework in 2026 combines qualitative engagement indicators (saves, meaningful comments, shares), business metrics (referral traffic, conversion rate, leads generated) and indirect Dark Social signals (spikes in direct traffic, shifts in branded search volume, source surveys for new customers). There’s no single metric that tells the whole story, but there is clarity in knowing which questions are actually worth asking.
Brands that keep optimising for likes will keep getting likes. Those that start optimising for trust, utility and real conversion will start getting something harder to achieve — and far more valuable.
At Fairplay we help brands and businesses build digital strategies that go beyond the easy numbers. If you want to understand what your social media is really doing for your business, let’s talk.