The ‘Relationship’ of Followers & Connections

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts

Do you want followers or connections? Is a connection more valuable than a follower and can you build relationships with followers without the need to connect?

This week I deep dive into this and explore the relationship between followers and connections but before all that…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Can LinkedIn Work as an Influencer Platform? I have been quoted in this article but I loved the comments from the other contributors especially the line “Just because people with large followings on LinkedIn do not necessarily embrace the term “influencer”, it does not mean that they’re not influencing people” from Joe Binder, this is so true for LinkedIn and I would go further in stating that you don’t even need a large following, just the right following! More of that in the main topic below.

As to whether influencers will directly make money from their content on LinkedIn, I strongly doubt they will other than the top 1% who would be disappointed if they got less than 100 comments on a post! The way to monetise content is indirect via the credible visibility that great content provides. An example in the article is Tom Fairey who is a new one to me and definitely worth following.

Why LinkedIn Is The One Good Social Network. This is a great article from Big Technology where they compare the stance taken by LinkedIn to content and the algorithm to other social networks citing the ‘broetry’ example from a few years ago where LinkedIn reduced the importance of the ‘see more’ click to reduce the effectiveness of long text posts.

The interesting thing about this is that they subsequently introduced dwell time to the algorithm which actually favours ‘see more’ clicks and long text posts. The author states that LinkedIn are prepared to ”sacrifice short-term numbers for long-term product health” which is an interesting point of view but I don’t believe this is always the case and LinkedIn are increasingly doing the opposite - perhaps this is a shift in tactics from LinkedIn. What do you think?

All that said, I do agree that LinkedIn as a company are head and shoulders above the likes of Facebook with regards to ethics and ‘doing the right thing’ for their members. Let’s hope it stays that way.

LinkedIn Premium News Feature has now closed. This feature was only launched in June but to be fair, it was described as a ‘pilot’. I can only assume that they have shelved it in relation to the new Creator mode and the potential for subscription revenue for creators.

Newsletter Invitations. As a follow-up to last weeks episode, I subsequently discovered that the setting to switch off the invitations is broken. Since switching it off I have managed to amass another 23 newsletter invitations!

Profile Picture. I was chatting to someone recently and they suggested tilting my profile picture! I couldn’t quite get my head around this concept but apparently, it can make you look a little less formal and focuses the eye on your face. I thought I would give it a go and to my surprise, I actually preferred it tilted! What do you think?

The Social Media Management Controversy.

In the UK this week a story has erupted on other social media about the appropriateness of ‘managing’ or controlling someone else’s content on social media.

Ex Man Utd player and popular sports pundit Gary Neville had some strong words to say about this interview!

I could find very little about this interview on LinkedIn but I think it’s an important debate to have. Is it right to ‘engineer’ things in this way and is this a natural consequence of the over-analysis that big brands put into their social media? I also think it’s a consequence of outsourcing your social media to someone else.

It makes sense to get help with content, we can’t do everything ourselves but players should be allowed to express themselves authentically - that’s what great content should be all about!

An example of a footballer who posts authentic content is the Watford goalkeeper Ben Foster who has his own YouTube channel, the video below is interesting, authentic and this is what football fans want to see…in fact, it’s what we all want to see on social media and on LinkedIn.

I suspect many brands are analysing their LinkedIn content in similar ways and I know companies who look closely at what their employees are posting, some even require every comment, like and post to be approved! What these organisations fail to understand is that their content is dull, boring and does nothing to promote their brand.

When will comms departments begin to understand that authentic, personal and honest content is what people want to see and what they will engage with, this is how you gain greater visibility, not by ‘social engineering’ in this way.

I’m also no fan of people outsourcing their content to others. I come across this all the time - the company realises their Page content always bombs so they ask some relevant employees to post instead, these people don’t believe they have the time or the company doesn’t allow them to write their own content and so what we get is the same boring crap from the company page, simply reproduced from the employees page!

Don’t get me wrong, I continue to work with organisations that do this because I realise that for the employee to ‘find the time’ to post their own content they need to first, truly understand it’s benefits, and it sometimes requires the company to create the posts for them initially.

The content still needs to be engaging and authentic and this can only be a means to an end.

Employees need to post their own content eventually and be confident enough to express themselves in an honest, authentic manner.

I know this is a tough ask but for content to work, it has to be orientated towards the audience and we know the LinkedIn audience wants authentic, personal content.

Connections And Followers

LinkedIn is a networking platform and networking is all about building relationships.

LinkedIn is also a publishing platform and publishing is all about building an audience.

Traditionally we tend to think of connections as those people we develop a one-to-one relationship with and followers are a group that we hope to influence en mass but in my experience, many people connect with others in such numbers that the difference between the two becomes unclear.

I don’t want to get into the factual differences between the two as far as LinkedIn is designed, John Espirian does a great job of explaining that in this article.

I think most people have lost any idea of the difference between the two and tend to consider them all the same.

I believe LinkedIn introduced followers because they saw that people were connecting with too many people because they realised that they would get more views of their content if they did. The initial concept was that connections should be people you know and trust only and they discouraged from connecting with anyone else. I think LinkedIn have softened that stance now and now see connections as existing and potential relationships…these people are part of your audience (followers) but the aim should be to grow a much bigger audience. This is one of the reasons they introduced the option to have ‘Follow’ as your primary button on your profile and why more recently it has become obligatory for those that enable Creator mode.

Here’s an interesting post on the subject;

Karen makes some great points, she also elaborated in a recent DM conversation with me…

“Fame doesn't pay the bills. It just feeds dopamine. I'm not sure CM is right for everyone's stage of growth...

It's like many are getting noisier, yet not really getting to know people. Together, but alone. It's all feeding into that trend. The narcissism of how we appear to strangers, without the authenticity of relationships. I know I'm harping on a bit, but I feel the magic is in the ability to DM, in the two-way, in being able to (selectively - I'm a fan of unfollowing) see each others content.”

In many respects, I think Karen is right. This obsession with growing followers (either by over connecting or by organically attracting them) is taking people away from the essence of networking - building relationships!

Relationships provide us with referrals as well as being a direct source of business and ignoring this opportunity makes no sense at all.

However, I disagree with Karen that fame, or framed more politely - visibility, just feeds dopamine, it doesn’t.

Some people lust after likes, comments, and views for the dopamine rush alone but many of us also realise that engagement leads to more views and more views equals greater visibility and the more visible you are, the more chance you have of attracting new business.

The truth is that growing an audience does pay the bills - as does developing relationships. The former can lead to the latter and that is how it should work. If you don’t grow an audience and your content is not visible then how do you source new customers? Apart from referrals you are left with direct cold approaches and that is the worst of all sins!

To get another opinion I asked John Espirian for his thoughts on this…

“A lot of my new clients have come from the "lurker" category of followers, whose intro message is usually of the form "I've been following you for X months/years and …" I simply wouldn't have had access to that audience without the visibility I've gained from switching to follow first (and latterly creator) mode. I still try to build relationships where possible through DMs, but also in public through comments, which means I don't need to be connected to everyone”

This brings up another interesting question…Do we not develop a relationship with followers through our content? Is it actually necessary to connect with someone in order to establish and grow a relationship?

The solution.

In an ideal world, I would like to have very few connections (less than 500) and tens or thousands of followers but that just isn’t possible on LinkedIn. I very rarely invite anyone to connect but I receive many connections requests every week, despite having ‘follow’ as the primary button on my profile.

It’s not practical for me to reply to each invite, asking them to follow instead, so I often accept them and hear nothing from them again! In effect, they are simply a follower who might also see my activity in their feed. The reality is that LinkedIn have done a very poor job of explaining to people who they should follow vs who they should connect with.

If I was starting LinkedIn from scratch (unfair on LinkedIn really because that is not how these things happen) I would make it that Connections are not automatically followers, in fact I would have two primary buttons on every profile - Connect and Follow. Each button would have a pop-up on the hover that would explain what each action actually means.

I would also add an option to easily reject an invitation to connect with the option to follow instead.

This wouldn’t completely solve the problem, but I think it would help. This might lead to a situation where we would have a much smaller number of connections which in turn would encourage us to develop relationships with those people.

We need to understand that LinkedIn is both a networking site and a publishing platform…and that’s OK. Both are extremely important to achieve success.

What do you think?

Post of the week

I think this might be the most nominated post ever! Funnily enough I saw it in my feed as a result of one of the first comments and I thought “that would make a great post of the week if it does as well as it should” - Well with over 20,000 reactions and nearly 2000 comments, it certainly did!

Another image post and Matt uses a trending social media headline of “How it started, How it’s going”. It’s well structured with a nice, easy on the eye layout but this mostly succeeds because A) It’s a personal story and B) it’s a message many can relate to.

Well done Matt, great post!

That’s all for this week, catch up again soon.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts