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Stop Worrying About The Wrong Stuff On Social Media

Likes and follows are not the end game.

My friend was pissed.

She spent hours writing a post and launched it on LinkedIn where it was greeted with crickets…except for the three likes she got from herself, her partner, and her old roommate.

Been there, felt that.

When she sent it to her email list, two people unsubscribed.

But the final straw was when she saw some other guy’s crappy post that somehow had scored 156,000 likes and thousands of comments.

Frustrated, she reached out to me for some advice and I encouraged her to stop worrying about the wrong stuff on social media.

I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t sting when your social media activity is met with silence, but in those moments here are a few things to remember…

Reach and likes are not an indicator of quality.

Sure, quality can help you you get increased reach, but for the most part they’re different things.

Don’t judge the quality of your content based on its reach unless it was specifically created to generate reach.

Just because you don’t get engagement on a post doesn’t mean it was low quality or people didn’t find it helpful — it simply means they didn’t have something to say about it or a reason to share it.

The reasons people engage with content rarely have anything to do with its quality.

Remember: Most videos that go viral aren’t actually high quality.

Don’t be fooled by the engagement other people get on their posts.

My friend has no idea how many people were reached with that guy’s crappy LinkedIn post or what the actual engagement-to-reach ratio was compared to hers.

She also has no idea what actually drove the reach of that post — maybe it was promoted with ads, maybe there’s a shady engagement pod of people pushing it, maybe it’s a result of a big influencer sharing it, maybe the creator has a buddy who works at LinkedIn and featured it as a favor?

Any post can appear successful with enough magic dust (paid promotion/favors/cheating) behind it.

But even if that person’s post caught on for legitimate reasons, it doesn’t mean that engagement translated to anything meaningful.

If your goal is to get clients, would you rather have a post that got you three likes and two new clients or 3,000 likes and no new clients?

Don’t overrate the importance of likes — they tend to do more for your ego than your bottom line.

Post what you want and find the people who resonate with it.

If somebody unsubscribes from your newsletter because they didn’t like your last email, do you really want them as a subscriber anyway?

Probably not.

It’s easy to forget this, but social media success isn’t about mass follower numbers, it’s about reaching the RIGHT followers.

More than 50 people unsubscribe from my For The Interested newsletter every week when I send it.

That doesn’t feel great, but the reality is it’s not for them and I’m not actually losing anything.

I’d rather they unsubscribe so I don’t have to pay to reach people who don’t care what I have to say anyway.

What matters is the people who want your content, not the dozens who decide they don’t.

Keep your eyes on the prize!