How to get more LinkedIn followers

Quick summary of how to get more LinkedIn followers

1. Inspirational and Motivational Content

2. Useful and practical content

3. Personal stories

4. Adding a CTA to your content

5. Use your LinkedIn analytics

Why do people follow?

Understanding why people follow, is half the battle of growing your following. When you realise the motivations of why someone decides to follow you, it will give you more clarity on how to do it.

The main reasons you’ll gain followers are because you’ve:

• They aspire to achieve something you’ve done
• They’ve been entertained by you
• They’ve been educated by you
• They’ve been inspired by you
• They connect with you

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but generally all followers fall into one of these camps.

So when it comes to your content, you’ve got to do one of these things to get a following.

Now, I’m assuming most of you reading this are here to win clients, so humour may not be your primary reason, it could potentially undermine your credibility.

So, using the list above, how can you grow your following?

Here are my best ones:

Inspirational and Motivational Content

Motivational content, such as quotes and personal stories are powerful in driving people to follow your profile. We love consuming quotes and anything that keeps us motivated or inspired.

Think about it, at times this world can be pretty miserable, so being a bit of positivity can make people want to hang around you more.

This is why good news stories, positivity, inspiration and motivation are so good at getting engagement. People don’t want to hang around miseries in life or on LinkedIn. 

Be upbeat, inspire people and give them something positive to move them forward.

Examples:

• Sharing stories of people overcoming adversity
• Motivational and inspirational quotes
• Positive language and an upbeat tone

Useful and practical content

If you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you’ll notice that there is a lot of practical content. There’s a reason too. Practical content, how-to’s, tutorials and walkthroughs that help people do something better will massively increase your engagement and following.

Think about all the things your audience may struggle with, how can you give them something practical that helps them do something that perhaps you think is simple and easy.

Whenever I share a step-by-step tutorial or PDF carousel with practical actions, they go down a storm and judging by my analytics drives more followers. 

Some examples of practical content can include:

• A template or guidance doc
• A video tutorials of how to do something
• Diagrams which help people understand an idea
• How-to content which helps someone create or do something specific

Anytime you give some content which is really practical and useful to your target audience, they’ll want to stick around for more.

Personal stories

Human beings love stories. We engage with them more deeply than just plain old information. If we wrap our story and a useful lesson together, people can connect more easily.

LinkedIn is known for its users leveraging personal stories as a means to grow reach and engagement. When I’m talking about leveraging personal stories and selfies, I’m not meaning thirst traps or invented hardships for engagement. I mean genuine experiences that have helped you and can help your audience.

Selfies do well for a number of reasons, the big ones being, selfies seem more authentic and we want to connect with people, so selfies signal to us that someone is trying to connect with us. Selfies seem more human and we are drawn to them.

Adding a CTA to your content

This is such a simple one. Many people miss it. Add a call to action on your content asking people to follow and giving them a reason why. Asking people to follow isn’t enough, you need to give them a reason why.

Examples of reasons why could be that they will “see more content that will motivate you to build an awesome business” or something more specific. 

The key is to ask and give them a reason why.

Use your LinkedIn analytics

Your LinkedIn analytics are your friend. You can correlate your profile views, follower growth and content impressions. This will tell you what content drives the most followers. Then you do more of what works. If you find that selfies get you followers - do more. If you find that talking about a specific topic gets you followers, you can tack into that and talk about it more.

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✅ Content that gets you followers

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✅ How to get more engagement on your content

✅ How Influencers 'cheat' to get engagement (and you can too)