To what extent is social media exposure correlated with financial performance for early stage digital consumer-facing startups?

Abstract

It is very hard to identify and evaluate very early stage investment opportunities in disruptive digital consumer-facing startups as they usually don't have any meaningful revenue data yet. However, these growing startups have "momentums". In classical mechanics, momentum is the product between mass and velocity. When it comes to startups, we can see revenue and web traffic as the mass and unique page views, social presence and sentiment, page rank, inbound links... as velocity (cf. Danielle Morrill start ups momentum index). Analyzing all these data is usually the most relevant way for investors to evaluate investment opportunities. It is however very unclear to what extent startups momentum is an indicator of financial performance. I would like to focus on social media exposure as an indicator of velocity for startups, and investigate further the correlations between social media exposure and revenue data.