One speaker's newsletter beat 25 speakers' links

One speaker's newsletter brought 288 people to our online summit in October. The social media links of 25 other speakers, added together, brought 137.

I build software at TOKERO, and until this week I had never looked at that table. Our second Smart Capital Summit ran online from 21 to 24 October 2026, with a programme of about forty speakers from finance and from outside it. Like most teams that run events, we work on an assumption so ordinary that nobody says it aloud: speakers bring their audiences. It is half the reason you invite someone with a following. You give them a link, they share it, and their people come.

So when I pulled the numbers for this article, I expected a table that said so. I wanted one figure nobody else has, and I thought it would be a flattering one.

The first version was. I grouped every tracking label that looked like a person's name, and the total for "people who came through someone" was large enough to confirm everything I believed.

Then I read the labels themselves. The biggest one was not a social post at all. It was a newsletter, sent by one of our speakers to their own subscribers. A few more were a paid ad whose name field had never been filled in. Once I had separated the email from the posts and checked every remaining label against the list of speakers, the social links came to less than a third of my first count.

So the assumption was not exactly wrong. One speaker did bring an audience, and a large one. The other 25 links mostly did not. Was the difference who they were, or how they asked? I think it was the asking, but read on.

Here is the data as it really is, 2,127 sign-ups sorted by the tag on the link each person used.

• Paid social: 1,126.
• Email: 590, of which 288 came from that one speaker's newsletter and 302 from our own list.
• No source recorded at all: 270.
• Social links of 25 other speakers: 137.
• Everything else: 4.

The obvious suspicion is that the tracking is broken. It is the right suspicion to have before you believe any number, the ones you like and the ones you do not. But the labels were there, the sums added up, and each sign-up was a different email address.

So I went looking for another explanation, starting with whether October was a fluke.

It was not. Our first summit, in March 2026, drew 2,858 sign-ups, and its tracking was looser, so I would not compare the two tables line by line. But one label stands out in both. In March, the same newsletter brought 719 sign-ups, more than any other single label. In October, only our Facebook ads and our own mailing list brought more. Two events, seven months apart, and the same newsletter near the top both times. That changed the question for me. It was no longer whether October was unlucky, but what that newsletter does that a shared post does not.

Paid ads are the other half of the picture. More than half of October's sign-ups came from paid social. That is not a surprise to anyone who has run an event, and it is the part of the table I understood least, because the cost of those ads is not in the data I was reading.

Maybe a handful of speakers did most of the work. That turned out to be true. The top link brought 38 people, and the top seven brought 98 of the 137. Eighteen of the 25 brought five or fewer.

Maybe the people who came through a speaker were somehow different. I can only test a rough version of that: how many signed up with an email we already knew from a TOKERO account. From our own list, 42%. From the speaker's newsletter, 14%. From the social links, 13%. From paid ads, 11%. So most people who came through a speaker, by email or by post, had no TOKERO account under that email. The newsletter simply brought far more of them.

What I am left with is a guess, and the table cannot prove it. The newsletter's sign-ups arrived in two waves, one in late September and one in the two days before the summit. That looks like two emails. An email waits in an inbox and asks one person one question. A post passes through a feed once. Our speakers have real followings, and they gave us their time generously. But a following on a feed and a list of people who chose to receive your emails may be two different things, and I had been treating them as one.

There are limits to all of this, and they matter. A sign-up is not attendance. This is one newsletter, and it may be an unusual one; from a single case I cannot tell how much is the channel and how much is that particular list. I do not know which speakers shared their link, or how often, so a small number may just mean a link that was never posted. One in eight sign-ups had no source at all, and some of those probably came from speakers by word of mouth; that is twice the social links' total, so it could change the picture. Only October's tracking is detailed enough to split by speaker. And I do not have the spend figures to tell you which channel was cheapest, so I will not pretend to.

Three things I would do differently next time. Ask each speaker one question: do you have a list, and would you send one email? Stop counting a shared post as a promotion plan. And read the labels before trusting the totals, because the wrong version of this table was the more convincing one.

I work at TOKERO, the company that hosted this summit. We run a socialfi platform for people interested in money and investing, so read all of this knowing that: tokero.com.

If you have run an event with invited speakers, I would like to know: did their audiences actually show up, and how did you find out?

Also published on Medium.