Your Likes Won't Pay Your Bills | Stop Chasing Likes and Start Tracking Customers
- carrierockenstein
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
At some point, I am not sure when exactly, but businesses owners started confusing attention with growth.
When new client tells me:
"We got 500 likes on a post we did last week. That's great, right?"
I hate to answer a question with a question, but my first question is always the same.
How many customers did it create? The conversation usually gets quiet.
To put it another way, 500 cars could have driven past your business today. That's almost the same thing.
Not because likes are bad. But because most businesses never stop to ask what those likes actually accomplished.
Did the phone ring?
Did appointments increase?
Did more customers walk through the door?
Did revenue grow?
Those are the questions that need to be asked and people just aren't asking them.
When I ask for client data, sometimes I'll get a report from a social media manager-still selling a "three post a week package". If I am lucky, it's from a Marketing agency with some reliable data and sometimes I'll get no data at all...but they'll tell me they boosted a few posts on the good old FB, but no meta performance metrics. Sometimes there isn't any meaningful data at all, as in they made some posts, but didn't look into it.
This is my favorite part, the investigation process. When the investigation begins I often discover and it is unfortunate, more often than not marketing expenses that have never been properly evaluated.
I once worked with a business (and still do) that was spending a thousand dollars every month on phone book advertising. In 2024.
And unfortunately, that wasn't the first time I had seen it.
Nobody had stopped to ask a simple question: Is this producing customers? It does require a little investigation I will say that, but worth the inventigation in the end.
At The Rockenstein Agency, we believe business decisions should be guided by outcomes, not attention.
Real data with real results. Because likes won't pay your bills, but new customers will.
What Are We Actually Measuring?
The marketing industry has become very good at measuring activity.
We can track likes
Views
Followers
Shares
Comments
Reach
Impressions
Engagement
There are dashboards for everything! The problem is that many businesses never connect those numbers to actual business growth.
A post gets 1,000 likes and everyone is celebrating, a reel gets 25,000 views or a page gains 500 followers, celebrating. Everyone celebrates and then the month ends.
Then the month ends...The phones are no busier, appointments haven't increased, revenue remains flat.
The question then becomes: What exactly are we celebrating?
Now all of these things matter; visibility matters, awareness matters and attention matters.
But attention alone isn't a business strategy, attention is only valuable when it creates action.
Vanity Metrics vs Business Metrics
Not all metrics are created equal.
Vanity metrics are numbers that look impressive.
Business metrics are numbers that help you make decisions.
Vanity metrics include:
• Likes
• Followers
• Views
• Reach
• Impressions
• Shares
Business metrics include:
• Phone calls
• Form submissions
• Appointment requests
• Direction requests
• Leads
• Conversion rates
• Revenue
A business can have thousands of followers and struggle financially.
A business can have a modest social media presence and be booked solid. For example,
Take our social media presence. We are pretty booked and don't pay much attention to social media. When we do post, we focus on topics we work on with clients every day. We don't rely on social media to generate clients because we don't need to. The difference is rarely the follower count, the difference is strategy.
Knowing Your Demographic
This is where the lines can blur if you don't know who your customers are.
For example; A repair shop isn't trying to become an influencer, a law office isn't trying to go viral, a roofing company doesn't need a million followers and a dentist doesn't need the most popular reel in town.
They need customers, plain and simple. The goal isn't attention, the goal is growth. If a social media post gets 5,000 views but creates zero customers, was it successful?
Was the goal views? Reach? Engagement? At this point, does it matter? Maybe, maybe not.
If another post gets 200 views and generates three new customers, I know which one I'd rather have.
The Social Media Advice Nobody Questions
Let's talk about something that has never made much sense to me. You'll hear social media experts tell business owners to post every day. It usually sounds like:
Post at 9:00 AM. Post a story at noon. Post a carousel at 5:00 PM. Make sure to use trending audio. Follow a specific formula, a specific schedule. The reasoning is usually the same.
"You need to keep your customers engaged."
But think about that for a moment, if you're doing everything right, your best customers are already customers. They already know who you are. They've already done business with you, they've already left reviews, they already interact with your content, they already recommend you to their friends and family, they're already buying from you. They are amazing customers!
The challenge for most businesses isn't reminding existing customers that they exist, the challenge is finding new customers.
That's where social media becomes valuable, but not the way you think. Not as a customer update platform, as a customer acquisition tool. And that's where many lose sight of the goal, including those that have been hired to gather the likes, shares and follows.
Data collection
Here's where I start asking uncomfortable questions. As a small business owner, you should have someone that can give you all this information when asked, or you should be able to answer them for yourself.
Who in your organization handles this? And...
Are you tracking your digital data?
Or are you relying on social media notifications?
Have you hired a social media manager?
Are you working with a marketing agency?
Are you running weekly campaigns?
Monthly campaigns?
Do you receive reports?
Do you know your conversion rate?
Do you know your cost per lead?
Do you know how many website visitors become customers?
Do you know how many phone calls came from Google?
Do you know which campaign generated the most revenue?
Can you identify which service produces the highest return?
If the answer is no, you're operating without critical business information.
And that's a problem.
Because without data, every decision becomes a guess.
The Questions Every Business Owner Should Ask
Let's assume you're paying someone to handle your marketing, ask them these questions.
How many leads did we generate last month?
What was our conversion rate?
Which campaign performed best?
How many phone calls came from Google?
How many website visitors became customers?
What was our return on investment?
What is our cost per lead?
If those questions can't be answered, you don't have a marketing strategy, you have activity.
And there is a difference, activity creates movement. But, strategy creates growth.
The Reel Gurus And The View Chasers
Open almost any social media platform and you'll find people promising to teach you how to get more views, how to go viral, how to beat the algorithm, how to grow your audience or how to increase engagement.
And, it's great that as self proclaimed experts are so willing to give you this information. Personally, before I listen to their advice, I look at their numbers.
Many of the people teaching others how to get views are averaging a few thousand views themselves. Meanwhile, they're selling courses explaining how everyone else should do it.
I've spent years creating content across multiple platforms. I've created videos that reached millions of people, in fact one of my personal favorites exceeded 100 million views.
So when someone tells me they have the secret formula because they generated 1,500 views, I'm probably not their ideal student. The reality is that getting views isn't the hard part, turning attention into customers is the hard part. A video can generate a million views and create nothing for a business, but a million views. But another video can generate a few hundred views and create multiple customers.
Which one matters more? The answer should be obvious, right?
Stop Being Sold And Start Selling
One of the biggest problems facing small businesses today is that they're constantly being sold. They're being sold:
Sold social media packages.
Sold SEO packages.
Sold directory listings.
Sold sponsorships.
Sold ad campaigns.
Sold promises.
Very few people are helping business owners understand the numbers behind the business.
At The Rockenstein Agency, we believe business owners deserve more than screenshots and activity reports. They deserve clarity, accountability and data. And most importantly, they deserve to know whether their investment is producing results.
When you understand your numbers, everything changes. You stop guessing. You stop chasing trends, stop making decisions based on hype, you stop being sold. And you start selling.
Why Businesses Work With The Rockenstein Agency
Most agencies focus on marketing activity. But here at The Rockenstein Agency, ee focus on business outcomes.
Marketing activity measures what happened online but business outcomes measure what happened inside the business. Did the phone ring? Did appointments increase?
Did website visitors become customers? Did revenue grow?
At The Rockenstein Agency, every recommendation is evaluated through one question:
Will this help the business attract more customers and generate more revenue?
This is precisely why our work extends beyond social media.
We help businesses improve their Google Business Profile
Strengthen their reputation
Increase local search visibility
Track meaningful data
Improve website performance
Understand customer behavior
And build systems that support long-term growth. Because getting attention is easy, turning attention into customers is where strategy matters.
The Bottom Line
The next time someone tells you their marketing campaign generated hundreds of likes, ask one simple question:
How many customers did it create? The answer will tell you everything you need to know.
Because likes won't pay your bills, new and fresh customers will.
See you next time.
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