The Customer Who Never Likes Your Posts (Still Buys)
Two likes on your latest post doesn't mean nobody's watching — it means you're meeting your silent majority where they actually live. Here's what changes when you stop writing for engagement and start writing for the lurkers who'll quietly walk through your door next Tuesday.
Dave Smith
# The Customer Who Never Likes Your Posts (But Still Buys From You)
You know that feeling when you check your latest post and see two likes — one from your mum, one from a former colleague who lives in Australia? The post you spent twenty minutes writing. The one with the photo you actually liked. Two likes.
It's tempting to draw a conclusion from that. The conclusion goes something like: nobody's reading this, nobody cares, the algorithm has buried me, what's the point.
Here's what's actually happening, and it's worth understanding before you decide to give up.
The lurker economy
Every time someone walks into your shop holding their phone and says "I saw on Instagram that you do custom orders" — that's a lurker. Every "I follow you online, just thought I'd finally pop in" — lurker. Every customer who quietly knows your opening hours, what's new this week, that you've moved the entrance round the back since the building work — they didn't learn that from a sign. They learned it from you, posting consistently, while they sat on the train or queued for a coffee or scrolled in bed at 10pm.
These people will rarely double-tap your photos. They might never comment. They might not even follow you in the strict algorithmic sense. They've just bookmarked your existence.
There's actually a name for this in marketing research: the "1-9-90 rule" — roughly 1% of an audience creates content, 9% engages with it, and 90% just consumes. On business social media the ratios are usually even more skewed than that. If you've got 400 followers and one or two like a post, that's not failure. That's the maths working as it always has.
Why this matters for how you post
Once you accept that most of your audience is silent, a few things change about how you write.
You stop writing for likes. Likes are a vanity metric for a small business — they don't pay your invoices and they don't predict who walks through the door. You start writing for the person who reads but doesn't react. That person needs different things from a post than the engagement-bait crowd does.
They need useful information they can act on. They need to be reminded you exist, regularly, without being pestered. They need to feel like you're a real business that's still trading and still cares. They need confidence — the kind you can't manufacture, but you can absolutely demonstrate by just turning up.
What they don't need is "WHO ELSE AGREES?? Comment YES below!" That stuff is engagement theatre, and the silent ninety percent can smell it from a mile off.
Stop measuring the wrong thing
Here's a small experiment worth running. For the next month, instead of checking likes, ask one question of every new customer or enquiry: "How did you hear about us?"
You'll start hearing things like "Oh I've followed you for ages" or "I saw your post about the new range" or "My friend tagged me in something you did at Christmas." None of those people necessarily liked the post they're referencing. They saw it, remembered it, acted on it.
That's the loop that actually matters. It just happens off-platform, in conversations and walk-ins and DMs and emails, where it's invisible to your social media analytics.
If you only judge a post by what happens on the post itself, you're missing roughly ninety percent of the data. You're staring at the receipt and forgetting the meal.
What to do tomorrow morning
A few practical shifts that come from taking lurkers seriously.
Post like you're talking to someone who's been quietly watching for six months. They already know what you do. They don't need the introductory waffle. They want the new thing, the useful thing, the human thing.
Repeat your important information regularly — opening hours, location, what's in stock, when you're closed for a bank holiday. The lurker missed it the first three times. They'll catch it the fourth.
Show up consistently rather than chasing the perfect post. The lurker isn't grading you on artistry. They're working out whether you're still in business and whether you're worth a visit.
And stop apologising for low engagement numbers. To you they look like silence. To everyone scrolling past, they look like a business getting on with it, posting useful things, present and accounted for. That's a much better impression than you think.
A small product note
This is exactly why a £29/month tool like Aunty Social can earn its keep for a small business. Consistency is the bit that actually moves the lurker needle, and consistency is also the bit that's hardest to maintain when you're running the rest of the business. If you can keep showing up — twice a week, every week, for a year — you'll have customers walking through the door quoting posts you barely remember writing. Whether that's via a tool or a determined diary reminder is up to you. The point is the showing up.
The two likes don't tell you the story. The till does.