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Founder-led content success metrics
Is your content strategy even working? Here are 7 ways to tell.
Tommy Clark
January 13, 2025
Hey!
Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.
We’re 2 weeks into 2025, and holy shit, things are moving. Sales pipeline is booming. Just hired a new Content Editor. Client accounts are cranking. Can’t complain.
Now, today’s newsletter.
I’ve spoken to 100+ B2B startup founders and marketers over the past year, from pre-seed to Series B+. Without fail, a question I get asked on every sales call is: How do you measure the success of founder-led content?
I got tired of repeating myself so many times. So I packaged my thought process into this essay.
Jokes aside, by the end of this, you’ll know exactly how to tell if your founder content is ‘working.’
Shall we?
🔎 DEEP DIVE
Founder-led content success metrics
Is your content strategy even working? Here are 7 ways to tell.
My goal is to get you customers—not make you a celebrity.
Founders eat this up when I drop the line on a sales call. Finally, someone who’s not just gonna artificially pump my follower count and tell me this strategy works.
Founder-led content is tricky, though. Of course we want to get you customers. But the approach most founders think will bring in business…actually scares it away. There’s a fine tight rope you need to walk.
Today I’ll walk you through my philosophy on measuring the ROI of founder-led content. And just to be clear. Revenue is the goal. I’ve scaled Compound to $1M in revenue in 2024 largely off of my content. Another client of ours generated $15M of pipeline from inbound, most of which was LinkedIn. Another was literally drowning in sign ups 1 week after we started posting.
Let’s lay it out for you, nice and neat.
I consider social metrics everything you see in a platform’s ‘Analytics’ tab.
Follower count
Net follower growth
Impressions
Engagements
Engagement rate
You should, and you will, see these numbers go up early on. One of my favorite moments as an agency owner is looking at the Month 1 social report and seeing that impressions have ‘increased 48,567%’ month over month. Never gets old.
Social metrics are not the end game, though. Remember that story of the Instagram influencer, ‘Arii,’ who couldn’t sell more than 36 t-shirts—despite having more than 2M followers?
The B2B version of this is the LinkedInfluencer with 200K followers whose entire comments section is full of AI bots, and devoid of respect from anyone meaningful in their industry.
The nuance here is that social metrics often have to increase before you see any meaningful business outcome (assuming you're starting from scratch).
So how do you reconcile this?
2 recommendations.
Social metrics are leading indicators. Give it 3-4 months. If by 4 months in you're not seeing a lift in inbound from LinkedIn—a few leads at minimum—you're doing something wrong.
Only celebrate increased impressions and follower growth when you're posting content that is relevant to your ICP (more on this here).
For example: if you're selling a GTM SaaS to VPs of Sales, I wouldn’t bank my entire LinkedIn strategy on hot takes regarding remote work (a broad topic that will get engagement on Linkedin).
But if you're posting content that VPs of Sales would find interesting, and your follower count is climbing, it’s reasonable to assume you're growing a relevant audience.
Ok. But what about the revenue?
Here’s where it gets fun. How can we tell if your content efforts are actually bringing in qualified leads?
Organic social attribution—attribution in general, really—is a pain in the ass. There’s no one metric that will tell the whole story.
So we need to keep an eye on a few that will give you a better understand of how well your content is converting.
Self-reported attribution
Inbound DMs
Web traffic
Email subscribers
Adjacent channel performance (when applicable)
Creative asset production (when applicable)
Sentiment (aka ‘vibes’)
I’ll unpack all 8 of these for you now.
Self-reported attribution.
In other words: ask prospects how they heard about you.
This is the most direct way to know how someone found you.
How do you execute this?
Train your AEs to ask this on a discovery call
Include a field on your lead form that asks “How’d you hear about us?”
I include a field in my wait list signup form that asks the question (side note: most report ‘LinkedIn’).
For my SaaS, Bluecast, we ask the question in the onboarding flow since we’re a self-serve company as of now with no need for a demo.
Now, self-reported attribution isn’t perfect. Say you sell an email marketing SaaS. Someone could have first seen a Linkedin ad 3 months back, then consumed 17 of your founder’s Linkedin posts, and finally booked a call after a marketing meeting where their founder asked them to launch a newsletter. What gets the credit? The ad? The content? The recommendation from the founder?
That said, how exact self-reported attribution is doesn’t matter. As you're posting on LinkedIn for 3-6+ months, you should see an obvious lift in the amount of people who are saying they found you on Linkedin. Whether 27 or 28 deals came in through the channel is splitting hairs.
Inbound DMs
This metric is incredibly simple. Are people reach out to you via Linkedin DMs to book a demo?
If yes, great!
If no, and it’s been more than 3-4 months, not great!
Keep a tally of how many of these you get. You can use a simple Google Sheet for this.
Web traffic
There is a right way and a wrong way to assess web traffic as it relates to social content ROI.
Wrong way? Put UTM links in every post. Try to attribute pipeline at the post level. This is asinine. Why?
Well, social platforms hate links. Their entire business model is held up by keeping users on-platform (Linkedin is slightly unique here with Premium, but you get my point).
Second, most buyers that come from social media don’t just see a single post, click a link, and sign up. Especially true for B2B SaaS products with an ACV north of $10K. The buying decision is a result of several inputs over weeks, if not months.
By trying so hard to ‘measure the ROI,’ you're making sure you don’t see any.
Ok. So what’s the right way to approach web traffic?
Think about it the same way we thought about self-reported attribution. You should see a clear lift in web traffic after you’ve been posting on LinkedIn for 3-4 months.
How do you track this?
UTM links, done right.
(1) Place a UTM link as your main link in bio.
(2) Place UTM links in the 1-2 Featured Links you have in your bio.
(3) Place a UTM link as your company link in bio.
(4) When you do include the occasional link in a single post, use a UTM link.
(5) Direct web traffic. Let me explain this one. When people see your content more and more on the timeline, they might end up typing in “[company].com” directly into their search bar, rather than clicking the link in your bio. Social keeps you top of mind.
Care less about which single post drove the traffic to your site, and more about the broader trend.
Adjacent channel performance.
A strong personal brand is a lubricant for performance on other channels.
Take cold email as an example.
Cold outbound is getting harder and harder. Companies are loading the spam cannons and hoping that folks on their lead list reply. AI SDRs are filling inboxes with atrocious emails. Response rates are looking bleak.
When you layer founder-led content in, the outlook changes. You go from a random name in their inbox to someone they recognize from the LinkedIn timeline.
It’s the difference between getting pitched by those solicitors on the side of the street to donate to ‘save the children’ and getting asked by a close friend to support a charity they care about.
Paid media is another example of this.
Paid media still works. But it’s getting expensive. Especially on LinkedIn.
When you have a Content Ecosystem built out, paid becomes more efficient. Again, they recognize you from the timeline.
See how this works?
Creative asset production.
Organic social is the ideal testing ground for creative assets.
We’ve seen consumer brands do this for years. A protein powder brand will send a relevant influencer a free tub. The influencer loves it, and makes an Instagram Reel about it—OMG I’m obsessed with this brand. It performs well organically.
The brand sees this, reaches out, and gets usage rights for the content piece. Then they’ll run it in paid media. That creative asset can unlock a new level of scale in their ad account.
Founder-led content makes you your own influencer.
You can test different hooks. Formats. Angles. Then, you can run the highest performing organic content as paid media. On LinkedIn, these are called ‘thought leader ads.’ And right now, they barely even look like ads on the timeline.
My point is, every time you post from your account as a founder, you're giving yourself an opportunity to find a winning ad angle.
Use organic LinkedIn as an R&D lab for your paid media.
Vibes. Hear me out.
Founder-led content allows you to punch above your weight class.
Done right, it can take you from relative obscurity to niche celebrity.
Adam Robinson was an early client of ours at Compound. We helped him launch his LinkedIn presence. When we did, something interesting happened. Every time he’d go to a conference or dinner event, he’d have people coming up to him saying “I love your Linkedin content.”
More recently, we’e helped Austin Hughes at Unify launch his LinkedIn motion, and we saw a similar trend play out. They’re relatively small in size compared to incumbents, but social content allowed them to show their momentum. It gets people talking. It gets you in rooms.
Another example, though not a client of ours, would be beehiiv. They’ve executed social—both founder-led and company content—to near perfection. They’re doing ~2M MRR as of writing this. Amazing. But also nothing in comparison to an incumbent like Mailchimp. Yet, beehiiv dominates the conversation on social.
Building on social allows you to create your own reality. You can paint the picture you want your target customers to see. Momentum begets momentum.
The previous metrics we went through let you quantify ‘vibe’ as well as possible. But there’s always going to be an aspect to this that just can’t fit into a spreadsheet.
Final thoughts
By now, I hope you see the light.
Social metrics do matter. They’re leading indicators. But they’re not what we’re after. Any content professional worth hiring cares about moving the business forward.
The dilemma is that there’s often a lag time between when you start posting and when you see those results. And the type of content that’s needed to get there may not seem like it ‘converts.’
Hold the line.
Posting social-native content on platforms where your ICP hangs you—Linkedin for most of you. Maybe X. Or YouTube if you're a video person.
If you can give this program 6 months of concerted effort, you will change the course of your startup.
And if you’re committed, read this next. It’ll map the entire playbook out for you.
🗃 FILE CABINET
Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.
Brutally Honest LinkedIn Advice From Alex Hormozi ****by Tommy Clark 🎥
How I raised $50M by Tyler Denk 📝
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch 📕 (marketers should read more fiction)
Content 3
Check these out.
BEFORE YOU GO…
As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week.
More from Social Files:
Talk soon,
Tommy Clark
Social metrics are a leading indicator.