My path to 5,000: A (converted) cynic’s guide to strategic follower growth on LinkedIn [Part 1 of 2]

It was the summer of 2020, and just when I thought I’d nailed my first conversation with a book agent who was interested in representing me, she went straight for my achilles heel:?

“Last question: do you have over 5,000 followers on any social media platforms?”?

I knew I was sunk. And pissed.?

I’d just spent the prior two years working with an academic to produce the world’s first peer reviewed research on sabbatical-takers. I’d interviewed hundreds of people, created a nonprofit to share the findings, given a TEDx talk, and been featured in a number of high profile press outlets.?

I felt like I was the right person to write a book on sabbaticals and I told her as much.

“That’s all great, and frankly, why I took this call,” she continued, “but the publishers don’t just want a book idea, they want someone to bring along their platform to help sell it for them.”

“Wait, so if Kim Kardashian wrote a book about sabbaticals,” I asked, “she’d get a book deal, but not me?!”

“That’s the idea, yeah. Unfortunately.”

—------?

Fast forward almost two years and here I am, with a couple dozen rejections from publishers because of the size of my platform, six months of sulking, twelve months of reluctantly experimenting…and a genuinely reformed attitude about social media. Oh, and finally 5,000+ followers.?

I’ve never been one for social media. In fact, I despised it.?

From the outside looking in, all I could see was what looked like a bunch of people humblebragging, dunking on each other, and in general, spending way too much time on the internet.?

But over the past year, I’ve started to see the good stuff, too.?

The virtuous cycle of connecting with new people working on similar issues. The fulfillment in hearing from complete strangers that what you’re putting out there is impacting their lives.?

I’m writing this piece for the skeptics and cynics about social media, but I’m also writing it for the believers and optimists, to give some actionable advice and strategies to grow their social media platform.?

This is advice for someone who has a message they want to get out into the world, not someone who is trying to get a job (though the same principles might be helpful) or to become famous for the sake of being famous (damn you Kardashian and your invaluable insights on sabbaticals!!).?

If you have an idea you want to bring to the world, not only are connections/followers essential, they make the journey less lonely and more fruitful. It should be obvious, but each incremental new follower was much more likely to actually care about—and engage with—what I was saying than my former coworkers, friends, and classmates.?

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.?

—----------

First, choose the platform that you hate the least, and commit to running an experiment. Experiments with social media, like most science experiments after grade school, are rarely an overnight endeavor.?

A good friend recommended sticking with it for 6 months before coming to any conclusion.?

For me, LinkedIn was the obvious choice. Not only is the timing great -- they’re having a great run of growth, new product development and attention towards creators -- it’s the place where folks are thinking about work, and therefore, time off from work.?

I didn’t have a large following by any means, but thanks mostly to my enormous business school class, I wasn’t starting from scratch either: 2,500 contacts as of May 2021. The year prior, I had 2,300 connections, amounting to ~10% growth year over year (YoY); I wasn’t exactly going viral.?

Once I’d selected LinkedIn, I began to deploy what I call the Beg, Borrow, and… Conform approach. Here it is, in brief:??

1. Beg people to follow you. (Well, not really beg, but it doesn’t feel that far off from it at the start.)?
2. Borrow other people’s audience.?
3. Conform to the algorithm -- by following the recommendations on posting cadence and timing -- as much as you feel comfortable doing so.

A: Beg

My first job was in sales at Angie’s List in Indianapolis, and it had a profound effect on me.?

When you’re in sales, everything is a sales funnel, with a process, and an associated conversion rate. You figure out all of the different approaches, try them, track them, and deploy more resources to the most successful ones.?

—-----

Mine your contacts:

So, I started by sweeping up all of my contacts from various platforms and putting them into a spreadsheet. This included phone contacts, gmail contacts*, newsletter subscribers and followers on other platforms. Luckily, LinkedIn wants you to do this, so they make it pretty easy, as long as you trust their pinky swear around not using your inbox as their marketing playground….

You can tell that they want you to do it, because they set NO LIMIT on the number of connection requests you send to your uploaded “contacts,” which is a weird loophole, since a contact can be just any email address you add into the spreadsheet.?

This is particularly important because, as you get to phase two of your growth, you’re probably going to get a warning message and/or capped at ~100 invite requests per week. That may sound like a lot, but compared to being able to upload and invite a thousand contacts in one go; it’s…. not very much.?

—---

Plant and harvest:

Next, start posting. Duh. I’ll talk a bit more about this in the Conform section.?

After I post, I consider anyone who has interacted with the post fair game for sending a connection request, or InMail, or whatever I have at my disposal to reach out. When you first start out, the supermajority —if not all— of the people who react to your posts will be your first degree connections, but this will change (slooowly) over time. Remember, you signed up for a six month experiment!

Because of this, the best way to grow early on is to find posts talking about what you’re interested in—for me it’s easy, sabbaticals—and comment on their posts. If you’re lucky, they’ll respond, or someone in their network will, and then…they’re fair game. I’ll talk more about this in the Borrow section.

—---

Redouble your efforts:

Remember how I said everything looks like a sales funnel to a salesperson? The only thing better than one sales funnel is two sales funnels: another way that I increased my growth early on was to create a company page for the sabbatical movement. I called it The Sabbatical Project because it was pithy and catchy it would be easy to find when people typed in the word sabbatical.

When you start a company page, you can send 100 invitations per month. This increases to 250 per month once you reach 1,000 followers.

At the beginning, and I’m sure this is not best practice, but frankly I didn’t have a lot of content, I just wrote one thing and reposted it in both areas.?

As your follower count grows, hopefully you’ll start getting 2nd and 3rd degree connections as followers of your company page. You can then invite those folks to be personal connections with a fairly high conversion rate, thus bootstrapping your growth.?

A quirky thing about this process is that you can only invite your connections, not your followers. I find this annoying and counter-intuitive, because the likelihood that someone would want to follow your company/movement page who follows you, as opposed to just being a connection, is quite high.?

—----

Segment your prospects:

Eventually, I identified three segments of people I was interested in: people who were pre-sabbatical, those who are currently on sabbatical, and sabbatical alums. Luckily for me, LinkedIn had just created a new product feature called “Career Breaks,” where people could better identify and categorize their time off from work.?

Absurdly late in my process, I realized that there were almost 100,000 people at any given time who identify themselves as either being on sabbatical, or having been on sabbatical. These folks are now at the top of my prospect list, and depending on their conversion rates, I will step on the gas accordingly.

Don’t forget to start a spreadsheet to track your monthly growth (link to mine HERE , and I’ll go over it in greater detail in the next post.)

Action items:?

• Find and export all of your contacts, including mining gmail (which is more complicated that you’d think, as there are lots of people you email regularly that aren’t automatically saved as contacts - look for "other contacts.")
• Figure out what platform(s) your ideal follower uses, and choose the one you hate the least like the most. What keyword in the “About” section, or in the way they describe their job experiences make the most sense for you??
• Are there multiple funnels you can create - like setting up a company page for your movement?