In 1984, the Grateful Dead did something no sane band would do – they roped off a section behind the soundboard and officially OK'd taping at their shows.
Every other act in music treated live recordings as theft. The Dead said tape the show – then trade the tapes and give them to your friends. And fans did – thousands of hours of them, passed hand to hand, including the rough nights.
The result was the most loyal audience in the history of the music business. Because when someone lets you hear the sloppy nights, you really believe the transcendent ones.
This week we released our 2026 year-to-date data setlist…and there are a couple flat notes.
Thanks for reading!
Eric
Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss
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The data setlist: the real (aggregate, anonymized) performance data from a sample of our clients' founder-led marketing programs — 1,202 LinkedIn posts and 54,710 connection invites, tracked daily for eight months. The data set doesn’t include new 2026 clients, a few outlier clients, and any RevBoss accounts.
Touch of Grey
The greyest number on the tape is the headline: the median client post earns 502 organic impressions.
Nobody gets excited about 502 organic impressions.
But of course there is quite the silver lining – the median client account drew engagement from 553 identifiable professionals over six months, also known as “leads”. For most clients, the 553 arrive a handful at a time, post after post, mostly without fireworks. Reach is effectively a lottery: the top 5% of posts drove 66% of all impressions. The top 1% drove a third of all impressions. The LinkedIn algo is definitely a power law game.
That said -- if I showed you a post in the 5th percentile by impressions and a post in the 95th percentile by impressions, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. (I know this because I usually can't tell the difference either.)
In other words -- we see lots of very good posts get 500 impressions that rack up 8 to 12 engagers per shot...and a handful of equally very good posts get 50k, 100k, 150k impressions that’ll generate 100s of leads in one shot.
In either case, this list is the whole ballgame -- the content gets the prospects close, the rest is all about the follow through and the follow up.
The messages that we sent (and our clients approved) to accepted connections earned replies 21.4% of the time – genuinely a staggering number.
People respond to people they've already decided to trust.
Ripple
Outside of doing things we don't recommend -- ragebaiting, sh*tposting, etc. -- you can't really engineer an outlier post. You can follow some basic parameters – invest in a good hook, write like you talk, etc. – but the algo remains fickle and frequently unfair. So we don’t waste time chasing “viral” posts.
The biggest lever comes from paying attention to what your audience and the algo tells you. When you sing certain notes, the crowd responds. So sing more of those notes.
Our best performing clients as measured by impressions and consistency of impressions are really good at singing the same few hit songs in lots of different ways.
And the Dead knew this very well. They played the same songs for thirty years and never played them the same way twice.
It just takes lots of Scarlet Begonias to get Cornell 1977 Scarlet Begonias.
Truckin’
Most marketing benchmark reports exist to make you feel behind, because feeling behind makes you buy things. Cherry-picked numbers, survey samples, everything up and to the right. Slop with a methodology section.
Publishing the real tape honestly felt a little risky to me but we decided the trade is worth it, for the same reason the Dead did: you build a lot more trust with an honest accounting of your trade versus performative bullshit.
The full report — methodology, caveats, and all — is here.
Let us know what you think.
I’m a big fan of Derek Thompson’s “Plain English” podcast. His most recent episode with Pangram CEO Max Spero was fantastic.
Pangram is an AI-detection app — you upload you text, image, etc. and it gives you a likely score. Lots of details about how it works in the episode — it’s been used to publicly bust AI-generated writing all over the internet — big media, publishing, academia, etc.
By Pangram's analysis, 41% of long-form content on LinkedIn is AI-generated. Four of every ten long-form posts in your feed — completely artificial, robo-content, shared with (IMO) complete disdain and disrespect for the reader.
On a platform that is literally approaching half machine — a problem at least partially of LinkedIn’s own creation, see “write with AI” button now eloquently counterbalanced with a “this is AI slop” button — acting as and writing like an actual human feels like a lost cause sometimes.
I say keep writing. The Deadheads recorded 1000s of shows because there was a real band playing…