The conversation was recorded in mid-April at a coffee shop near London Bridge. The head of social — call her Sarah, as she requested — has been in role at the brand for six years. The brand is a challenger UK media property with a subscription model, a growing paid product, and a small in-house team responsible for the substantial social footprint. She agreed to be interviewed on condition of personal but not company anonymity.
The decision
Ines Farrugia: Take me back to the decision. When did you stop chasing reach?
Sarah: The formal switch was in Q4 2024. The informal thinking behind it had been building for about a year before that. I had been looking at a peculiar pattern in our own analytics. We had, over the previous eighteen months, produced a small number of very high-reach posts — several with two or three million impressions — and had noticed that the follower count, the subscription conversions, and honestly the general brand-health metrics we track did not move measurably in response to them. The reach was real. The downstream response was not.
What I noticed, when I finally spent a fortnight in the data trying to understand this, was that our high-reach posts tended to reach a substantially different audience from our high-conversion posts. The high-reach posts hit a broad, low-intent slice of the platform's audience — the algorithm's classification of them as "interesting" was correct, but the audience that found them interesting was mostly not the audience that would ever subscribe to our product. The high-conversion posts, by contrast, hit a narrower, higher-intent audience — smaller reach, meaningfully more engaged with our specific proposition, much more likely to convert.
The metric that best distinguished the high-conversion posts from the high-reach posts was, unexpectedly, saves per follower. Not saves in absolute terms — saves per follower. A post that produced a save from 3% of the people who followed us was materially more predictive of downstream subscription conversion than a post that produced ten million reach and a save from 0.02% of that reach.
Ines: What did you do with that observation?
Sarah: I switched our internal reporting to primarily track saves per follower. Reach continued to be tracked in the background — I'm not sentimental enough to throw away a metric that has legitimate uses — but it stopped being the number we reviewed weekly. The number we reviewed weekly was saves per follower, per post, per platform.
What her CMO thought
Ines: How did the CMO respond?
Sarah: With some scepticism, at first. He is a person who has spent a long career in marketing and had, entirely reasonably, been trained to think of reach as an important indicator. My argument to him — and it took me perhaps two months of small conversations to make it stick — was that reach on modern social platforms is a supply-side variable rather than a demand-side one. The platform decides how much reach to give a post, based on its own commercial and algorithmic priorities. What the audience actually does with the reach is the demand-side variable. Reach without engagement is the platform giving us distribution we cannot convert; engagement without reach is our own audience valuing what we make. The second is more valuable.
He came around, eventually, when I showed him the twelve-month decomposition. Our best-performing quarter, on conversion-to-subscription, had been the quarter with the lowest aggregate reach in the previous three years. Once he could see that on a chart, the argument was, if not settled, at least survivable.
"Reach is a metric that measures what the platform gives you. Engagement measures what your audience gives you. When you optimise for the first, you're negotiating with a platform whose interests aren't aligned with yours. When you optimise for the second, you're building something the platform can't take away."
What her team ships now
Ines: What does the team's output look like now, versus before the switch?
Sarah: Substantially different. Before the switch, we were shipping perhaps 18-22 pieces of social content a week across our primary three platforms. The composition of that output was heavily weighted toward pieces that we believed had reach potential — visual formats, hooks that fit whatever the algorithm was rewarding that quarter, topical takes on news stories.
Now, we ship perhaps 11-13 pieces a week. The composition is different in kind. We ship, on average, one long-form editorial piece a week that runs at the length of a good newsletter. We ship more direct-to-audience formats — writing to camera, replies to specific audience questions, transparent process pieces. We ship less "content" in the sense the industry usually uses the word. Our team's editorial standards per piece are, honestly, higher than they were three years ago because we have the time per piece to hold them.
Ines: How did the subscription number move?
Sarah: New subscriptions from social sources, in the twelve months following the switch, rose approximately 47% year-on-year. Some of that is background growth. Some of it is a strong year for the underlying subject we cover. But roughly two thirds of the lift, on our own decomposition, is attributable to the increased conversion rate per social touchpoint, which came from the format shift we made after switching metrics.
The generalisation question
Ines: Should other brands do the same thing?
Sarah: With one caveat, mostly yes. The caveat is that saves-per-follower, as a primary metric, is most useful for brands whose economic model is downstream subscription or purchase. For brands whose primary purpose is awareness — mass-market consumer brands where the marketing objective is brand recognition rather than direct conversion — reach still has a legitimate role, though I would argue it should be weighted alongside brand-tracking survey data rather than being the sole indicator.
For a subscription business, a DTC brand with a clear conversion event, a B2B SaaS with a well-defined funnel — any brand where a specific downstream action is what the social function is trying to produce — the metric shift is, on my strong prior, the right one. Reach is a distraction. Saves per follower is a leading indicator that predicts the thing you actually care about.
Ines: Last question. What would you tell another head of social who wants to make this shift but is worried about the internal politics?
Sarah: I'd tell them to run a shadow report for two quarters. Keep publishing your reach-optimised report to your CMO. Also publish, alongside it, a saves-per-follower report. Show, over two quarters, which of the two better predicts the downstream number the business actually cares about. Almost always, saves per follower will win. When it does, use the shadow-report evidence to make the case for switching the primary report.
This is a much easier conversation than the one I had, which was more argumentative and less evidenced. The shadow-report approach lets the data do the argument for you. It takes six months longer than a direct argument would. It succeeds substantially more often.