How Do I Know If This Is Working?

Here's something that happens on almost every sales call I have. I ask, what does success look like for you? And the person pauses. Sometimes they turn it back on me. I really have no idea how to measure something like this. What's your take? Which is a fair answer. This is new territory for a lot of leaders and I respect the honesty. But more often something interesting happens. In the first 10 minutes of the call, before I asked that question, they've already told me exactly what they want.

They want to be seen as a credible voice in their industry. They want investors to know their name before the first meeting. They want top candidates to feel like they already know who this leader is. They want to own the narrative in their category instead of watching a less experienced competitor do it. That's what they say they want. And I believe them because those are real things. And that's exactly what LinkedIn visibility done right over time delivers. But then I ask, what does success look like? And something shifts. It's like literally a gear change.

Suddenly they're talking about new pipeline, attributing new candidates to specific posts, tying investor outreach back to a piece of content, measuring reach and impressions and follower growth month over month. And I sit there thinking, those are all top of funnel content marketing metrics. And that's not what you just told me you wanted. There's a fundamental mismatch happening between what leaders actually want from LinkedIn - credibility, perception, trust, narrative ownership - and how they try to measure it, like a paid advertising campaign with clean attribution and a dashboard. And that mismatch is what causes people to quit. Not because it isn't working, but because they set the wrong measuring stick at the start, and then they judge the investment against a standard it was never designed to meet. That's what this episode is about. Not just how to know if LinkedIn is working, but how to set the right definition of working in the first place.

Because if you're measuring this like an AdWords campaign, you will get the wrong answer every time. And you'll walk away from something that was building exactly what you said you wanted. This is Cultivating Executive Presence. I'm Justin Nassiri, and this is episode nine. How do I know if this is working?

Let me stay on this gear shift moment because I think it explains a lot. When a CEO tells me that they want to be perceived as a thought leader in their space, they want their name to carry weight in rooms they haven't walked into yet, they're describing something that is fundamentally about perception. It's long term, it's compounding, it's qualitative. It's the kind of thing that takes 18 months to build and once it's built is nearly impossible to replicate quickly. Nobody measures that with a dashboard.

You don't track percentage of target investors who now recognize your name in HubSpot. You don't run a monthly report on Credibility Delta. You know it's working when you walk into a room and someone already knows who you are. When a candidate says they've been hoping to work with you specifically. When a journalist calls you instead of your competitor for a quote. When a deal closes faster because trust was already there. Those are the outcomes and they are real.

And they're what the leaders I work with are actually building toward, even if they can't articulate it cleanly when I ask that question directly. But the moment I say, what does success look like? Something in the executive brain switches over to what I'd call the accountability frame. And the accountability frame defaults to metrics that can be reported up, justified to a board or compared to last quarter. New pipeline, leads attributed to content, investor meetings sourced from LinkedIn.

And here's the problem. Those metrics aren't wrong exactly. LinkedIn does drive pipeline. LinkedIn does influence investor relationships. LinkedIn does surface candidates, but it does those things on a long nonlinear timeline through channels that are nearly invisible to standard tracking, which means if you're using those metrics as your primary measure of success in the first six months, you're almost guaranteed to conclude it isn't working, even if it's working exactly as it should. The mismatch is this: the desired outcome is long-term perception, the measurement framework is short-term attribution, and those two things are fundamentally incompatible. So before we talk about how to know if it's working, we need to talk about what working actually means, and that means being honest about which game you're actually playing.

There's a concept in marketing called dark social, and it's one of the most important ideas I've come across for understanding why LinkedIn feels like it isn't even working, even when it is. The term was coined about a decade ago to describe a very specific problem. When someone reads something online and shares it privately via text message, email, Slack, a direct message, there's no tracking pixel that follows it. There's no UTM parameter. The referral just shows up as direct in your analytics, or it doesn't show up at all. It's dark. It's invisible. But here's what's interesting. Dark social doesn't just describe what happens when people share content. It describes what happens when people consume content and act on it without leaving any visible trace on LinkedIn. This is the default behavior, not the exception. Think about your own behavior. When you scroll LinkedIn, how often do you like every single post that resonates with you? How often do you comment on them?

For most people, the answer is rarely, if ever. You read, you absorb, you form opinions, and you keep scrolling. No like, no comment, no share. Nothing the algorithm or the author can see. But you didn't forget it. It shaped how you think about that person. It sits in the back of your mind. And three months later, when their name comes up in a conversation, or when you're looking for someone who does what they do, it surfaces, and you reach out, or you respond warmly to an outreach, or you mention them to a colleague, or you walk into a sales meeting and say, I really liked your perspective on... and the conversation starts at a deeper level immediately. This is dark social on LinkedIn and the research on this is striking. Depending on the study, anywhere from 70 to 90% of online content consumption happens without any visible engagement, which means that for every person who likes your post, somewhere between seven and nine other people read it and left no trace. Let me say that differently. Your posts are reaching significantly more people than your engagement numbers suggest. And the vast majority of those readers - the ones who are actually forming opinions about you, building trust with you, moving towards you - are completely invisible. That's why I say the posts with 40 likes aren't underperforming. You just can't see most of the performance.

I had a conversation recently with a CEO in the professional services space. He'd been posting for about eight months, solid content, consistent cadence, and he was genuinely frustrated. His engagement was modest. He couldn't trace any revenue to LinkedIn. He was ready to scale back. Two days before our call, he had a meeting with a prospect who told him part way through that she'd been following him on LinkedIn for almost a year. She'd probably read about half of his posts. She'd already recommended his company to two friends, but she had never once engaged publicly with anything. The CEO was grateful, but also genuinely shocked. He had no idea this person existed as a reader. She'd never liked a post, never commented. Unless she'd explicitly told him she was reading, he would have had no way to know. And yet she was already a referral source. In my experience, this is not unusual. It's the norm.

The likes are the minority, the dark social readers are the majority, and the dark social readers are often your most valuable audience because they're consuming carefully and deliberately, not casually. If you have been posting consistently for six months or more, I can almost guarantee you have an audience of dark social readers you don't know about, and they are further along in trusting you than you realize. So how do you actually know what is working?

If you can't see the dark social readers and if attribution is messy, what is the signal? In my experience, the signal almost always arrives in one of three places. A sales conversation, a hiring conversation, or a catch-up call with someone you haven't talked to in a while. And it's almost always sounding the same. I really like the thing you posted about X, or I've been following you for a while, I really like how you talked about Y. And the reaction every single time without exception is surprise.

The CEO didn't know this person was reading. They never liked or commented. They appeared out of nowhere with warm familiarity as if they'd been in a long conversation that only one party knew was happening. That's the moment. That is LinkedIn working right there. I want to share one of these moments from my own experience. About 18 months into building Executive Presence, I got an InMail on LinkedIn from a guy named Matt. Matt was a year behind me at the Naval Academy. Great guy, but I hadn't talked to him in over 15 years.

I honestly wasn't sure what he did for a living. Out of nowhere, he sent me a message: Hey Justin, I'd like to introduce you to my CEO. I think she needs to work with you. As much as I like Matt, I hadn't thought about him in years. I had no idea he'd recently joined a company that was a perfect fit for what we do. I had no way of knowing he'd been watching what I was building on LinkedIn for 18 months, quietly absorbing the value of executive visibility, waiting for a moment when he could make the connection.

But Matt and I were connected and every time I posted, he saw it. He never liked a single post. He never commented. But when he found himself working for exactly the type of leader we serve, he made the introduction. We got on a call. She agreed with all of his assessments. They signed within two weeks. That is the power of dark social. 18 months of silent reading, zero visible engagement, one message, a new client.

The problem is that most people experience these moments as a pleasant surprise rather than a qualitative signal. They appreciate it, they move on, and they don't connect it back to the question of whether their LinkedIn presence is working. I want you to start connecting those moments explicitly. Every time someone references your content in a conversation - a sales call, a hiring interview, a check-in with an old colleague, a board meeting, a conference hallway - mentally log it. Because what you're witnessing is a dark social reader surfacing, and every single one of them represents dozens more who are still in the shadows, still reading, still forming opinions. The mistake is treating those moments as coincidences. They are not. They're proof of concept. Here's the complication. Those moments don't surface on their own. You have to pull them out. I learned this the hard way. I used to start sales calls by asking, how did you hear about us?

Sounds like a clean attribution question, but the honest answer most people give is, I'm not quite sure, or I don't really remember how we got connected. And if I just accepted that answer and moved on, I'd walk away from the call thinking the source was unknown. What I've learned to do instead is ask a second or even a third question. What made you reach out now? Had you heard of us before? Did anything specific prompt this? And that's when it comes out. Actually, I think I saw something you posted about CEO visibility a few months ago that stuck with me, or my colleague forwarded me something you wrote, or I've been seeing your content on LinkedIn for a while, it just made sense to reach out. Every single one of those answers is a LinkedIn attribution, but none of them would have shown up in a CRM if I hadn't probed. Because the person didn't think of LinkedIn as how they heard about me, they thought of it as just knowing me, which is actually a much stronger outcome than a click-through, but it's completely invisible to standard attribution models.

Build this into every sales conversation, every recruiting call, every conversation with a new contact. Not as a rigid script, just as a genuine question. Had you come across our work before this conversation? And then be patient, give them a moment to think. Sometimes they don't remember until you create the space for them to. The data you'll surface this way is imperfect. It's qualitative, not quantitative. You can't put it in a dashboard, but over time it gives you a real picture of how your LinkedIn presence is softening the ground ahead of you. And that picture is almost always more positive than people expect. I want to offer an analogy that makes this click for most people, because when I explain LinkedIn's ROI in terms of a channel they already understand, it lands differently. Think about conferences. If you've been in business for more than five years, you've probably attended a conference where the ROI was genuinely hard to measure. You spent two days, you had hundreds of conversations, you collected business cards, you followed up. And at the end of the quarter, you tried to figure out how much revenue came from those two days. And you probably couldn't, not cleanly at least. But here's what you know. The conversations mattered. The relationships are real. The visibility you created - being on a panel, having people see you at multiple sessions, introducing yourself to the same person three times until they remember you - that compounds. And you know it compounds because the moment you stop going to conferences, something tapers. You're less top of mind.

The inbound conversations slow, the warm relationships cool. The ROI of a conference is real. It's just not typically trackable in a spreadsheet. LinkedIn is the same, except it's a conference that runs 52 weeks a year, reaches people who aren't in the room, and has a compounding archive. Every post you publish is a panel appearance. Every post that resonates is a hallway conversation someone remembers. And the audience isn't limited to the 300 people who showed up on a Tuesday in Chicago.

It's everyone in your industry who's active on the platform. I've had CEOs tell me they can't justify the investment because they can't tie it to specific revenue. My question back is almost always, can you justify your conference budget? Can you point to the specific deals that came from the last conference you attended or spoke at?

Usually the answer is no, but they keep going anyway because they understand intuitively that the ROI is real even when it's not 100% traceable. LinkedIn works the same way, and here's what I know from the CEOs I work with. The moment they stop posting, they notice. The conversations that were warming up go quiet, the inbound slows, the candidates who were following them stop mentioning their content, the presence they built starts to fade.

You often feel the ROI more clearly in its absence than in its presence. And that's a hallmark of dark social. I've talked about why traditional attribution doesn't work for LinkedIn and why dark social means you're reaching far more people than you can see. Now I want to talk about something practical. What the performance curve actually looks like and why it matters for how you interpret your results. It's a pattern I've seen play out across almost every executive I've worked with. It's consistent enough that I can set expectations at the start of an engagement almost exactly. Month one is almost always the best month. Not because the content is the best it's ever going to be, but because LinkedIn is actively trying to hook you. They want creators, they want people publishing original content consistently. So when someone who hasn't posted in months or years or ever suddenly shows up with consistent quality content, the algorithm rolls out the welcome mat.

Your reach spikes, your impressions jump, you get likes from people you haven't heard from in years, follower growth feels significant, and there's a genuine dopamine hit. I've watched executives go from skeptic to convert in their first two weeks purely because month one numbers are so validating. And then month two happens. The algorithmic boost fades, the novelty wears off, and the numbers drop back to something more like baseline. Not to zero, but noticeably below month one.

And this is where executives get nervous. Why isn't this working anymore? Am I doing something wrong? Where are my numbers from last month? You're not doing anything wrong. You're just seeing the real baseline now. Month one was the audition. Month two is the job. Months three through six is where the real work happens. Growth during this period is slower and less dramatic, but it is real and it compounds. You're building a catalog of content. The algorithm is learning what you post about and who responds. Your audience is growing. The dark social readers are accumulating. The ground is being softened. And then somewhere around months six to nine, things start to shift in ways you can feel, not just see in the analytics. The "saw your post" moments start happening more frequently. Sales conversations open warmer. Recruiting outreach gets better response rates. You get a text from a colleague you haven't heard from in years. Someone makes an unprompted introduction.

People you've been trying to reach for months suddenly reply. By month 12 and beyond, the flywheel is genuinely spinning. Every new post lands harder because the audience is larger and more engaged. The archive of content you've built is working for you even when you're not actively posting. The perception you've been building over the course of a year is now a real asset. The CEOs I've worked with who stayed the course for two, three, four years - they're the ones who show up in my case studies with landmark exits and major IPOs. Not because LinkedIn caused those outcomes, but because LinkedIn was one of the channels through which they built the perception that made those outcomes possible. And the perception takes time to build. Understanding the curve matters because it tells you how to interpret your results. A month two dip is not a failure. It's the algorithm recalibrating.

Months three through six feeling slow is not stagnation. It's compounding in the quiet phase. And a month nine conversation where someone says, I've been following you for almost a year, is not a coincidence. It's the flywheel. Let me get more specific about what to actually track because I don't want you to walk away from this episode thinking the answer is just trust the process and don't measure anything. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is measure the right things, and understand their strengths and limitations. That's often the nuance missing when people look at any of these numbers. For LinkedIn, there are four metrics I come back to consistently, plus a layer of qualitative signals that tells you things the numbers never will. Metric number one, total monthly impressions. This is the top line number. How many people are seeing your content and is that number growing month over month? LinkedIn provides impression data at the post level and in aggregate.

And while it's imperfect, it's directionally useful. A consistent upward trend means the algorithm is rewarding your consistency. That's a good sign. But - and this is really important - impressions alone can give you a false read. If you start posting about productivity, you'll get enormous reach. Productivity is one of the most universally appealing topics on LinkedIn. You could triple your impressions in a month just by leaning into it. But is that the association you want to build? Is productivity the perception you're trying to create, or do you want to be known as a genuine subject matter expert in a more specific niche where the reach numbers might be smaller, but the right people are seeing your content. Total monthly impressions tell you whether you're growing. The next metric tells you whether you're growing with the right people. Metric two, precision. This is one of the ones most people skip and it's the most valuable. There are two ways to look at this. First, your connections.

LinkedIn lets you download your entire connections list. I always have to Google the exact steps, but it's simple once you know where to look. Once you have it, you can categorize your connections against your ideal audience profile. What percentage of your network are actually the people you're trying to reach, and is that percentage growing over time? Second, look at individual post performance. This is a gold mine most people don't even know exists. Click on any LinkedIn post you've done and you can see the demographics of who engaged. Title, seniority, company size, industry, geography, all of it. So you can answer the question, when I posted about this topic, were the people who responded my actual target audience? If yes, do more of it. If your post about your morning routine got 500 likes from people who would never hire you or work for you or invest in you, that is useful information too.

I'd argue this demographic data is valuable well beyond LinkedIn. It's one of the most precise signals available about what messages resonate with your specific audience. If you have a sales or marketing function, this data should be feeding into it. Metric three, profile views. This is one of my favorite early indicators. A profile view means someone saw your content, got curious and clicked to find out who you are. That's not passive scrolling. That's active interest.

Someone asking, wait, who is this? Pay attention to this number and watch for increases. In our work with clients, we actually use profile views as a daily trigger for outreach. We review who viewed the client's profile and if they match the ideal audience profile and aren't already connected, we send a connection request. That way the next time we post, they see it. It's a simple way to convert passive interest into a growing audience of the right people.

This is something we do systematically for clients, but you could do it yourself. It takes maybe 15 minutes a day. Metric four, month over month follower growth. This is the simplest KPI and it's reasonable to track alongside the others. It's a rough benchmark. Half a percent to 5% per month is a healthy range for most executives once a program is established. In month one, especially starting from a lower follower count, it's not unusual to see 15 to 20% growth as LinkedIn gives you that initial algorithmic boost.

Expect that to normalize in month two. Same caveat as impressions - precision matters here too. A follower outside of your target audience doesn't move the needle the way a relevant follower does. Treat this as a quick and easy KPI. Worth tracking, but not worth obsessing over. Those are the four: impressions, precision, profile views, and follower growth. Together, they give you a quantitative picture of what's happening.

But there's a layer underneath the numbers that's harder to measure and often more meaningful. These are the qualitative signals, the moments that tell you the flywheel is actually turning. Are you getting texts from people you haven't talked to in a while? What prompted that? Are you catching up with someone and they already know what you've been working on, even though you haven't spoken in months or years? Are you being introduced to new people by colleagues who say, you should know this person? Are your posts generating direct messages - not public comments, but private conversations from people in your target audience? Every one of those moments is a dark social reader surfacing. You wouldn't build a dashboard around them, but start noticing them because when they start happening consistently more than once a month, you're past the tipping point. The numbers will confirm it eventually. The qualitative signals get there first. There's something I've noticed about CEOs who've been doing this for 18 months or more.

They stop asking whether it's working. Not because they stopped caring about outcomes, but because the signal is too clear to question. It's not a dashboard signal. It's a lived experience signal. It's the feeling of walking into a room and having people already know who you are. It's the recruiting call where the candidate says, I really love the culture I see at this company, their CEO is exactly the type of leader I've been hungry to work for. It's the investor meeting where the partner says, we've been watching your content for a while, we think you really understand where this market's going. It's the text from a former colleague you haven't spoken to in four years who says, I've been following your work, I think what you're building is remarkable. These things don't show up in a spreadsheet, but they are outcomes, real ones, career-defining ones. And here's what's interesting about that 18-month mark. The CEOs who got there consistently describe a shift in how they think about the whole thing.

They stop thinking of it as just marketing. They stop thinking about it as brand building and they start thinking of it as just showing up, a practice, something they do. And the outcome feels less like ROI and more like reputation. That is the end game - not a dashboard, a reputation. I want to be real with you about something. I do this work because I believe visibility is now part of leadership at scale.

I believe that the CEOs who show up consistently and share what they know are building something that compounds in ways no other channel can match. But I also know that the evidence for that is often qualitative, often delayed, and often invisible until it isn't. What I'm asking you to do is stay long enough to see it. Don't quit because month two is slower than month one. Don't quit because you can't draw a clean line from post to deal.

Don't quit because your posts are getting 40 likes from people who aren't your target audience, because somewhere out there is a version of your next customer, your next investor, your next hire, reading everything you post, never liking any of it, and already deciding they want to work with you. They're just waiting for the right moment to surface. Let me make this actionable. I don't want this just to be a reframe episode. I want you to walk away with something you can do this week.

Here's the practical playbook for measuring whether your LinkedIn presence is working. First, start probing. In every sales conversation, every recruiting call, every new relationship, get curious about how they encountered you. Not just how did you hear about us? Go deeper. Had you come across my work before? Had you seen any of our content? Give people the space to remember. You'd be surprised how often LinkedIn is the answer they didn't think to give. Second, build a simple running log - not a spreadsheet, just a note on your phone. Every time someone references your content in a conversation, a call, a meeting, a text, coffee, log it. Date, who it was, what they referenced. At the end of six months, look at that list. That's your attribution data. It won't be complete, but it'll be real. Third, track depth, not just size. Every month, look at your LinkedIn analytics and ask who is engaging with my content. What are their titles? What companies are they at? Are they the people I'm trying to reach?

If you're reaching the right room, even at small scale, you're on the right track. Fourth, pay attention to the warmth of inbound. Keep a loose mental model of how warm your inbound conversations feel at month one versus month six versus month 12. Are people coming in knowing more about you? Referencing specific things you've said? Further along in trust before the first conversation? That warmth is LinkedIn compounding. You'll feel it before you can measure it.

Fifth, set your measurement window correctly. Don't ask is it working at month two. Ask it at month six for early signals, at month 12 for real evidence, at month 18 for the full picture. If you're asking at month two and comparing it to your paid advertising dashboard, you will get the wrong answer every time. The compound effect is real. I've seen it play out with hundreds of executives across every vertical I've worked in, but it requires patience that most dashboards don't reward. Let me bring this home. We started this episode with a gear shift moment that happens on almost every sales call I have. A leader spends the first 10 minutes telling me they want credibility, trust, narrative ownership. And then the moment I ask, what does success look like? They describe an ad campaign. New pipeline, clean attribution, a dashboard. That gear shift isn't dishonesty. It's discomfort with ambiguity.

It's the accountability frame kicking in. It's the difficulty of saying, I want to be perceived as the most trusted voice in my industry, when you can't put a number on it. But that's exactly what you want. And it's exactly what this builds, just not in the way that shows up in a spreadsheet. The vast majority of people your content is reaching will never like it, never comment on it, never share it. They'll read it quietly, form opinions, and carry those opinions into future conversations. That is dark social, and it's not a bug.

It's how most consumption of content works. The attribution problem is real, but it's not evidence that nothing is happening. It's evidence that what's happening is hard to trace - like a conference, like reputation, like trust - all of which compound and all of which are nearly impossible to map to specific revenue in real time. The curve takes time. Month one will feel great. Month two will feel disappointing. Months three through six are where you're building.

And somewhere around month nine to 12, the flywheel starts spinning in a way you can feel rather than just measure. The signal that it's working isn't a dashboard. It's a conversation. It's the moment someone says in the middle of a meeting, I've been following you for a while. It's the candidate who shows up already bought in. It's the investor who knows your name before you've been introduced. It's the text from someone who hasn't reached out in three years.

Like my friend Matt, who I hadn't spoken to in 15 years, who introduced me to a CEO who became a client within two weeks. Because he'd been watching what I was building on LinkedIn in silence for 18 months. Pay attention to those moments, probe for them, log them, because they're not just coincidences. They're dark social readers surfacing. And if you haven't started yet, or if you started and stopped, the answer isn't a better measurement framework. The answer is starting, because the data only exists if you create it and the compound interest only builds if you put money in. The best time to start was a year ago. The second best time is today. Next episode, I'm going to tackle the question that lives right next to this one, the reluctant CEO. If visibility feels uncomfortable, if it feels like self-promotion, if it makes you cringe a little bit, that's the episode for you. We're going to talk about how to be visible without losing your integrity, and how to reframe the whole thing from ego to service. I'm Justin Nassiri. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.