It's really easy to get followers but it's far more difficult to acquire genuine and meaningful recommendations on LinkedIn.
It's really easy to get followers but it's far more difficult to acquire genuine and meaningful recommendations on LinkedIn.
Sadly, there are so many "effluencers" here on LinkedIn who go after followers to persuade you that they are somebody worth following. Looking at follower numbers is a really bad way to measure how good they'll be for you. It's a bit like measuring the speed of your car by focusing on the rev counter. If you never get out of first gear you won't get anywhere very fast.
I was inspired to write this article after attending an online zoom business networking meeting which turned out to be full of deluded BSers. If somebody gives themselves the title of "Influencer" check out who they actually influence and what they influence them to do. Many o9f them are just "effluencers" with nothing actionable to say.
There was a very nice lady in the Zoom Room who kept telling us all about her 283,000 LinkedIn followers. That's a very impressive number but what does it actually mean to you. Not a lot. She's a second degree connection so I have no idea how many connections she has. After the meeting I was "influenced" to check out her LinkedIn profile. Surely, it must be one of the best profiles on LinkedIn to get that many followers. Sadly not. It has more holes than a Swiss cheese :-)
Firstly, you'd assume that someone with so many followers would have a high number of endorsements. This lady has 565 endorsements which is less than 0.002% of her followers. Out of those endorsements just 5 people have clicked to say that she is highly skilled at one of her skills. That's less than 0.00002% of her followers who think she's highly skilled. That tends to suggest that she isn't influencing many people to do much other than click a button that says "follow" once and never really follow her from then on :-)
For many years endorsements on LinkedIn haven't really carried that much value. It was an easy way to be nice to someone you've briefly bumped into once. Most people hoped that if they gave an endorsement, the person who they've never actually used at all would feel obligated to do something nice in return. They have no real value.
A better way to determine someone's real value to one of their genuine first degree connections that they should have worked with is to check out their recommendations. If they consistently do good work for people those people will be motivated to take the time to actually write a recommendation in their own words. You can't really fake a recommendation because it has to come from a genuine first degree connection. However, some people do send suggested text which I wouldn't recommend. We can all tell the difference between genuine reviews and ones that have been "manufactured".
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So, coming back to my example, the lady with 283,000 followers must have worked successfully with loads of people and they will have been highly motivated to post their recommendations for her work. I think you'll have guessed where I'm going with this. She only has 22 recommendations from more than 10 years membership of LinkedIn. So that is less than 0.00008% of her followers who think she's good enough to recommend.
Does every recommendation have the same value. No, of course it doesn't. When you read her recommendations most of them contain platitudes which give you absolutely no idea of what she actually did for the person writing it and what the genuine outcomes were from working with her. Here's some examples
All those words are really nice but are they any use to you. Well, that depends what you are looking for. If you're considering paying someone to help you achieve an real outcome I would suggest you need to read about what they actually did rather than how nice they were on the phone or a zoom call.
Out of 22 recommendations only one, the first one, actually said what she had done for the person who recommended her. Ironically, that was 10 years old and for photography which this lady says she's retired from. The other 21 recommendations have all been made in the last three years so she had over 6 years with absolutely no recommendations.
All that glitters is not gold so please take some time to dig a little deeper before being influenced by meaningless measurements like the number of followers someone has acquired. In this case I can see this lady frequently posts images saying if you follow her, she'll follow you back. The same awful tactic that people used to us on Twitter. It doesn't help you to rate how good the person would be for you!