How To Get the Right FOLLOWERS

We all want followers on social media! It is so flattering for the ego to see the numbers grow. And if you do it right, you will win the true prize: clients! But I want to caution you about a few considerations regarding social media growth.

Followers are not created equally. There are quality followers and there is dead weight.

A quality follower is someone who has a large network themselves, whose profile looks great, who is very active online and posts regularly, and whose audience is the same as yours essentially.

I recommend checking carefully each and every profile before you accept to connect. Look for quality first.

A dead weight follower is a profile that is very obviously incomplete (no photo, no title, etc), they barely have any network themselves, they don't post at all, and they have no audience. Or even worse, there are many fake profiles out there. This is the worst thing for your account to be connected to them.

A dead weight follower will not only stunt your growth but also could cause others to unfollow you since they may go through your network and solicit others, for example cold pitching or even asking for money, etc. I've seen it happen and your network will see the root source of the problem by looking who is their mutual connection to this offending person...it is you!

Some people ask me why they shouldn't just grow for the sake of growing. Isn't it "the bigger, the better."? Yes and no. You should work to grow your network but not without a clear strategy and goals. Let me explain why you always want quality over quantity.

The Linkedin algorithm is looking to see within the first hour who engages with your post. If the majority of the small subset of connections it shows your post to like it and comment on it, it will promote it and show it to more connections. And the cycle continues.

Compared to other social media platforms, Linkedin content has a long shelf life. On Twitter, a tweet will die almost instantly because people are tweeting so often. On Linkedin, a post can last for up to a week, no joke. This is amazing but you are killing your own success if you have too many dead weight connections who don't engage with your content.

The sad part is that maybe your content is great but because Linkedin is showing it to your dead weight connections and they aren't engaging, your quality connections will never, ever see your post nor have an opportunity to engage on it.

Makes sense?

Is that what you really want? No, of course not.

Furthermore, when people vet to connect with you, they look at your connections. They can easily do this in Sales Navigator as well as the Mutual Connections feature visible to anyone. If they see multiple high-quality connections, they will want to connect with you and your social value will increase. You want to be a top rated connection who everyone wants to follow, right? Then keep your network high quality!

I made this mistake too in the beginning by accepting too many requests. Then I suffered from it and had to remove people.

Your number one criteria to vet your high-quality connections is to pick people who will engage on your content regularly.

If they aren't in your same audience, why would they care about your topics? Bad choice. If they never post anything, it means they probably aren't even on Linkedin that often. Bad choice.

Join my community of 14k+ growth-oriented, success-hungry people who get my monthly Newsletter.