How I Grew My LinkedIn Account to 12,305+ Followers

A few data points about my journey on LinkedIn from 0 to 12,305 followers:

• I made my first LinkedIn post over 9 years ago.
• I was a very passive LinkedIn user (think “post resume and nothing else”)
• I might post 1 time each year. In exciting years, I might post 5 times.

Even after I launched AXDRAFT, I only posted when I had an announcement to make. At best, this was once a quarter. 

But then with AiSDR, I decided LinkedIn was where I needed to be to spearhead our founder-led sales strategy and share the latest features our product team cooked up.

Here’s the story behind how I grew my follower count to 12,305+ people. 

TLDR:

• The goal: Grow followers to more than 10,000
• The tactic: Create content on LinkedIn on a consistent basis
• The result: Reach 12,305 followers

Step 1: Decide what your goal is

There are a lot of ways for you to use LinkedIn beyond posting your resume:

• Prospecting
• Networking
• Relationship building
• Social listening
• Targeted advertising
• LinkedIn events (e.g. webinars, virtual meet-ups)
• Newsletters

Many of these fall under the larger umbrella of lead generation, but you can also turn your LinkedIn into a thought leadership outlet or another play for your go-to-market strategy.

At the end of the day, you need to decide what’s your primary goal for LinkedIn: Generating leads? Finding new customers? Positioning yourself as a thought leader? Building a personal brand?

In my case, I decided to work towards becoming a thought leader who learns from others and shares my experiences.

Step 2: Optimize your LinkedIn headline

A lot of people use their LinkedIn headline to list their job title and workplace. Some, especially people early in their career, might even add the most recent or prestigious university they attended.

This is fine if you’re using LinkedIn as a resume distributor. But if you’re using LinkedIn for lead generation and sales, you’ll want to build out your headline.

Before I updated my headline, this is what it was:

But after doing some research and lessons on how to use LinkedIn for lead generation, I expanded my headline to this:

This is still my current headline, though I might make some adjustments further down the line.

Step 3: Create content and engage with others

The majority of the content I create comes in the form of LinkedIn posts. But like I mentioned earlier, the world is your oyster. You can create articles, polls, surveys, and all sorts of content.

Currently, my content “plan” (if I can call it that) is:

• Written posts on weekdays
• Video posts on weekends
• Approximately one webinar per month
• Leave comments on interesting posts
• Engage with people who comment on my posts
• Posts are published when it’s the morning for my target audience

Usually, my content revolves around my work at AiSDR and different sales experiments I run. But I also share lessons I’ve learned from reading, from other LinkedIn content, and even a bit of everyday life.

As a general rule, whenever I make a comment on someone’s post, I try to leave value. Not just “Nice insight!” or “Cool! Thanks for sharing.” Most of the time, I share my honest thoughts and try to continue the conversation.

Similarly, whenever someone leaves a comment, I (a) leave a short “Thanks!” and a reaction if the comment doesn’t say much or (b) engage in a back-and-forth dialogue if the comment says something meaningful. 

Step 4: Review performance and adjust as needed

At first, I was publishing only on weekdays. As I saw greater traction, I upped my game and started posting every day.

After several more months of positive growth, I started posting both written and video content. Admittedly, video posts take a lot more time and effort than written posts, so it’s possible I might stop making them in the near future so that I can focus on creating content with more value.

I only increased my content creation because I saw I was getting results, which you won’t know unless you’re regularly reviewing performance.

I also see which posts go viral, which have zero traction, and what happens if I accidentally miss a day. Two of my posts that went viral each saw 200K+ impressions.

I’ve also leveraged some high-performing posts and re-purposed them as LinkedIn ads.

The Result

Consistency matters.

This is one of my biggest takeaways from using LinkedIn. On several occasions, I’ve seen my metrics drop whenever I missed a day for one reason or another.

But thanks to consistently posting content each day for several months, I saw my follower count break through the 10K milestone and climb above 12K.

I know there are many who have scored more followers in less time, but I’m fine with that.

As I said in Step 1, you need to decide on your goal for LinkedIn. 

For me, that’s having good conversations and interacting with smart people. And I’ve been fortunate enough to do just that.

Coincidentally enough, it’s Thanksgiving week, which means that this last sentence is perfectly timed:

I’m grateful to each one of my followers for choosing to follow and engage with me ❤️🙂