In a world where likes, shares, saves, and doom scrolling seem to rule the marketing world, a common question keeps on being asked: Are social media KPIs an actual signal of incremental value? Or are they just vanity metrics that make dashboards look good but tell you nothing about real business impact?

Welcome to the uncomfortable, yet liberating, truth about social media measurement - and how incrementality might just be the BS-radar you’ve been looking for.

It’s the ten thousand pound gorilla question – is Social actually incremental?!

The deceptive comfort of social media metrics

Let’s be real (pun intended). Marketers have a bit of a love affair with stats, especially those that point up and to the right. The KPIs that actually matter often look like a zig zag between green and red – i.e. profitability. But profitability, or even incremental revenues, are almost impossible for marketers to measure themselves without the tools to untangle the layers of influencing factors. 

Yes, social media KPIs and social media engagement metrics like followers, likes, comments, and re-shares are easy to track, leading marketers often celebrating those as as quick wins in campaign reviews.

But here's the harsh reality: Correlation is not causation. Just because engagement went up doesn't mean your sales did. Those pretty metrics might be disguising wasteful spend or crediting platforms for conversions that would’ve happened anyway.

Or even worse – you may be celebrating a video-gone-viral which causes millions of people to share, laugh, or recognize – but when asked: “which brand put this video up?” , 9 out of 10 would not remember it was your brand.

The root problem: Measuring what matters isn’t easy

You know what’s harder to measure than likes, followers, shares? Impact.

The traditional playbook of tracking social media metrics to track is great for visibility, but not for accountability. You may be optimizing your campaigns to drive more engagement, but are you optimizing for actual business value?

That’s where the practice of media measurement often falls short. It rewards vanity instead of effectiveness. Worse, it leads to overconfidence in channels that may not actually contribute to growth.

Incrementality: The great equalizer

Incrementality measurement asks the one question that most dashboards conveniently ignore:
“Would this conversion have happened if we didn’t run this campaign?”

At INCRMNTAL, we don’t use (nor believe much) in fluffy metrics. We believe in measuring the true incremental lift your media investments yield - without relying on cookies, user-level data, or invasive measurement tactics.

Social media platforms are masters of self-attribution. That’s why we built INCRMNTAL Analyst - a solution that strips away the noise and tells you exactly which campaigns actually moved the needle.

No guesswork. No inflated reports. Just truth.

Instead of measuring vanity metrics, shift your focus toward metrics that help you make better decisions, like:
• Incremental ROI by channel
• Residual (i.e. incremental) impact of social posts over organic and paid conversion rates
• Budget reallocation opportunities based on real impact

You can get those with INCRMNTAL’s actionable insights platform, which shows you how to spend smarter, not just louder.

Social media metrics in the age of AI

With AI-driven media buying becoming the norm, the margin for error is shrinking. Just because a machine told you the campaign performed doesn’t mean it actually did. If anything, the reliance on opaque algorithms has made media measurement even harder.

We explore this evolving landscape in our LLM + Advertising Resource, where we dive deep into how AI and machine learning are changing the game - and why human oversight (with incrementality as the compass) is more important than ever.

Here’s what you should do next:

1. Audit your current social media KPIs. Are those vanity metrics or value metrics?
2. Stop trusting platform-reported results blindly. I don’t need to explain why. Right?
3. Start measuring incrementality. It’s the only way to know if your media dollars are working.
4. Use a platform like INCRMNTAL to get the real story behind your campaigns - and optimize based on truth, not hype.

Because at the end of the day, you deserve better than good-looking lies. You deserve clarity.

Ready to see what your campaigns are really doing? Start here.