The Gospel According to Facebook 📣
Claire ran Golden Crust Bakery, but she might as well have been running a fan club for Facebook. Every morning she brewed coffee, opened her laptop, and genuflected before the holy numbers:
Reach: 8,412.
Likes: climbing steadily.
Impressions: a number so big it made her croissants look small.
“This,” she told herself, “is why the bakery is thriving.” In Claire’s mind, Zuckerberg might as well have been her business partner.
The Website She Forgot to Notice
Meanwhile, her little website—a simple menu, an order form, and her nephew’s surprisingly good SEO—was humming along like a silent cash register. Local customers Googled “birthday cake near me,” found her, and placed orders.
But Claire never looked at the site’s analytics. She assumed those sales were obviously the fruit of her Facebook empire. After all, what else could explain the surge in custom cake orders besides the 74 likes on last week’s photo of a baguette?
Vanity Metrics, Empty Calories
Facebook’s stats had all the nutritional value of cotton candy:
Reach: counted every bored scroll-past as if it were a love letter.
Engagement: rewarded a “Yum!” from a cousin in another state.
Shares: celebrated when someone tagged a friend who lived three time zones away.
It looked delicious, but just like an over-sweetened cupcake, it wasn’t filling.
The Punchline đźŽ
Then came the awkward truth. At a networking event, another shop owner asked, “How much traffic does your website get?” Claire finally checked. The data smacked her in the face: her website was drawing hundreds of local visitors every week and driving almost all of her sales.
Facebook, for all its confetti, contributed about as much as a free sample tray at Costco—visible, yes, but not the reason people bought.
Epilogue: Glitter vs. Gold
Claire laughed at herself. She had been hypnotized by Facebook’s glitter, convinced that reach equaled revenue. In reality, her boring old website—the thing she ignored—was the golden goose.
From then on, she treated Facebook stats the way she treated the bakery’s decorative sugar: nice for show, but not what feeds people.