My [highest-performing Instagram post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DV0xjl_AfzK/) by orders of magnitude is a sixteen-second clip of me half asleep on my couch watching Arab rap battles. It got almost a million views and tens of thousands of likes and shares. It was the perfect piece of content by every metric that matters to a social media manager. Engagement through the roof. Comments pouring in. The algorithm loved it. My dopamine loved it even more. It felt great. Only one problem: it generated approximately zero dollars for my business. Conversely, I'll often hear from some of my best clients that they heard me say something on a podcast episode that resonated deeply with them and even moved them to go from vaguely interested to bought in. The same episode where I'd wondered what I'd done wrong because of the sad looking download numbers. There's a counter-intuitive tension at the heart of social media that almost nobody talks about, and it's this: the content that engages the most almost never sells the best. It's the gigantic gap between good feels and good deals. We've been taught by platforms, by marketers and by algorithms that likes, comments, and shares are the scoreboard. Get more engagement, and good things follow. This is true if you're a creator whose business model is attention. If you're selling ads or getting paid per view, engagement *is* the product. But if your goal is content that sells something of high value such as consulting, professional services, high-ticket B2B offers, then traditional engagement metrics will almost always be a false negative. Here's what I've noticed after years of selling to business owners: the people who constantly comment, like, and engage with your content are rarely your buyers. The heavy engagers tend to have more time than money. # Dark Social Media Your real buyers lurk, and their engagement often happens in the dark. They screenshot your post and text it to their business partner. They forward your email to their head of marketing with "we should do this" written above. They bookmark your video and come back to it three weeks later when they're ready to make a decision. They bring your name up in meetings you'll never attend. I've had my content unknowingly featured in keynotes, corporate strategy sessions, and board meetings, none of which showed up in my analytics dashboard. I only found out about them by chance, sometimes years later. This is what I call dark social media. It's the forwarded emails, messages in private WhatsApp groups, text messages and Slack threads where real buying decisions happen. There's no attribution, no tracking pixel. All the wealthiest people I know text more than thirteen-year-old girls. It's fast, it's private, and it leaves a trail they can reference later. They don't leave public comments on your LinkedIn post. They forward it privately to someone who can send you a wire transfer. Looking at my own buying behavior, I've bought at least a hundred thousand dollars' worth of professional services in the last year from people creating content on TikTok. Yet I've never once commented or liked a single one of their videos. I watch. I save. I forward. I buy. I'm a lurker. A lurker who buys. If you're selling something high-value, with a longer buying cycle, this invisible audience is your real audience. The reason so many professional services firms feel that social media doesn't work for them is that they're measuring the wrong thing. They look at their anemic engagement numbers and conclude that content marketing is a waste of time. These same business owners sink huge budgets into SDRs, appointment setters, and cold outreach. Even when the numbers from these activities are terrible, at least they can immediately see the metrics. And you can optimize something you can see. There's a psychological payoff in that. So what do you do with all this? First, stop optimizing for engagement and start optimizing for resonance. Engagement asks: did they (visibly) react? Resonance asks: did it enter a conversation already going on in their mind? Did it confirm one of their fears or biases? Did it make them think "finally someone said it" — perhaps better than they could articulate themselves? Engagement gives you good feels. Resonance gives you good deals. Second, make every piece of content standalone. If your post requires three previous posts of context to make sense, it won't get forwarded. The lurker's friend won't scroll through your feed to understand the backstory. They'll just move on. Your content needs to be a self-contained packet of value that makes sense to someone seeing your work for the first time with zero prior context. This, by the way, is why books work so well as a marketing asset, particularly for professional services. A book is the ultimate self-contained package. It has built-in authority (to be an author, you have to be an authority). It has built-in time on content. Someone who reads your book spends perhaps six, eight, maybe ten hours with your ideas. No Instagram reel will ever match that kind of depth. And most importantly, a book gets passed around. "You should read this" is one of the most powerful marketing sentences. Lastly, create for the person who forwards, not the person who comments. The buyer often receives your content secondhand. Your job is to make the forwarder look smart for sharing it. When someone sends your post to their business partner, they're implicitly saying "I'm the kind of person who finds valuable things." Make them right. This requires a shift in what you create. You stop chasing the content that generates the most comments and start asking: what would someone screenshot? What would someone bring up in a meeting? What idea is so clear, so useful, so well-articulated that it becomes social currency in private channels you'll never see? The "have you seen this?" conversations happening on dark social media networks are the kind of engagement that makes you real money. Your best-performing content by likes and comments will rarely be your best-performing content by leads and revenue. Create for the lurkers. They're your best customers. They may not clap in public, but they applaud with dollars. --- **Liked this?** Join 200,000+ readers who get my twice weekly newsletter: <div class="newsletter-form"></div> (It's like your smart, good-looking friend who gives you awesome, actionable marketing and business growth ideas in 5-minutes or less.)