This year, two of my clients started with the same number of followers.
I used the same frameworks and the same five levers for both of them. One of them, an ERP consultant, averages 350 impressions per post and recently got 2 inbound leads after a couple of months of posting and trial and error.
The other client, who is a senior management professional at a telecom company, gained more than a 20% increase in follower count in less than 2 months, with median impressions per post at 2.5k.
Wildly different results.
Growing on LinkedIn is simple: you need to do five things. And you need to do them every week.
So before we go into the growth levers, if you ask me what the results of doing this would be, I unfortunately cannot tell you. I wish I could say there is a one-size-fits-all formula. Unfortunately there isn't. But there is a framework you can apply to your own case.
I walk every client through these five levers in our kickoff. How each lever performs, however, depends on a few key things:
How crowded your industry is,
How active your audience is, and
How much of yourself you are willing to put out there.
The idea is to take these levers and make them your own.
Lever 1: Posting
The obvious one. Everyone starts here (and most people stop here too).
Three types of posts work on LinkedIn generally.
Contrarian posts, where you challenge something people accept as the general norm. Think SEO is dead, Web Development is dead etc. As you must already know, these are extremely overused on LinkedIn. There is still a place for these posts but you need to be more clever now.
Regenerative posts, the informative infographics and comparisons your audience wants to reshare to their own network. A caveat on regenerative posts: they may do exceedingly well or they may do extremely poor. There is no formula to them yet. In some industries they are still the mode, in others they have gone stale. Experiment and watch.
Reflection posts, based on your personal experiences and learnings, the ones nobody else can copy.
When people usually ask me, what kind of posts are guaranteed to get them most likes, I always say put your own photo up. In one of my previous articles, I spoke about how posts with my own picture generate 4x more impressions than regular posts (median impressions 1000 per post). See the data below for the posts where I used my own photo.
Magicpost data for posts with my photo on it.
I know, it feels cringe. It works anyway. My rule is not more than once a month, because more than that is just too much.
If you would like to get the same data for your own LinkedIn profile then I would highly recommend MagicPost. You can click below to create an account, get on a free trial and get 15% off for life in case you decide to upgrade.
Lever 2: Commenting
This is the most crucial yet the most overlooked lever.
Commenting is really powerful. When you comment, your headline appears directly against all the followers of the person who posted something. LinkedIn also rewards conversation.
For this lever, I divide comments into two kinds:
Low-value comments for posts that already have a lot of comments. Here your comment is just one among the sea and you comment only for exposure, not necessarily to add to the conversation.
High- value comments are reserved for good posts with a gap in the conversation, where your perspective actually adds something.
Example of Low vs High-Value comments
To show you how important commenting is, I will tell you a story. One of my clients went on holiday and had approved their posts in advance, so I scheduled two weeks of content while they were away. The posting continued without them. The commenting stopped completely. Because with commenting I have a strict rule: I provide comment options but the client has to post them themselves.
Why? I hear you ask. Two reasons. The comment needs to be something you can defend. And a comment becomes powerful when someone replies and you are able to respond to their reaction, in the moment. That cannot happen if a ghostwriter comments for you.
Back to my client, his impressions drop from 800 per post to 200 per post. Absolutely dramatic, I know. He comes back from vacation and begins commenting. Want to guess the impressions on his next post? 1000+
So, moral of the story: Do not overlook this powerful lever.
Lever 3: Connecting
“Creating content is great, but building distribution is greater” ~ Someone on LinkedIn.
You can create the best content in your industry and it will stall if the same 400 people keep seeing it. Content + engagement help you build the brand you want. Distribution comes from more people seeing your posts.
100 connection requests per week is what most people accept to be true. However, it differs by profile. Some profiles can comfortably add up to 100, while others have to limit it to 50 a week. It depends on the number of connections you currently have and how active you are on LinkedIn. There is no published science to this. So, watch your own limits and max out what your profile allows.
Lever 4: Inviting
This is the lever used properly by very few. Inviting people to a LinkedIn newsletter, an event or a live is a non-invasive way of getting them to interact with you without sliding into their DMs. Lately, most people invite you to like their newsletter as soon as you connect with them, which is extremely annoying. The idea with invites is to be non-invasive. It is to test the waters and get people to engage with something that you believe will create value for them (newsletter or webinar/live event).
It is the cheapest distribution you can build, because you are not spending on ads and you are not losing goodwill via cold messages.
Confession: This is the lever I skip. A huge missed opportunity, I know. Time to work on this.
Lever 5: Messaging
Last for a reason. Outreach messages work when they arrive after the other levers have done their job. "Hey, I saw you attended my webinar, what did you think of it?" is a conversation.
The same message to a stranger, however, is a pitch, and pitches die in inboxes.
If it's so simple, why do people pay you?
Fair question. Better I ask it than a Reddit commenter.
LinkedIn is not rocket science. Staying accountable on the other hand... is HARD
Most people don't have time to make LinkedIn their full-time job, and the five levers only work when they are used every single week, including the weeks you are tired, busy or convinced nobody is reading.
That consistency and accountability are what clients actually buy.
The framework itself = Free.
What I am still a bit unsure of is this: When growing on LinkedIn, how often do you reach for the tactics that inflate reach (for example: the memes, or the unhinged posts engineered for shock value)? I am personally not a fan of overusing these. And yet I get tempted to try it from time to time. The levers I trust. My own restraint, I am less sure about.
Grow-th Architect is where I (Shreya Vaidya) think out loud about brand-building, positioning, and surviving on LinkedIn. If this resonated, subscribe, or share it with someone who needs to hear it.