How to grow LinkedIn to 2000 followers. My LinkedIn strategy

Hi! This is the new edition of Discover with Jane newsletter, and I’m sharing my LInkedIn experience today.

You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

I've recently hit 2,000 followers on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my favorite social media and my key platform I use for both blogging and for bringing clients to my agency. 2,000 followers is not a large number, but I'm also not a big influencer so far.

So if you're looking for information how to start small but grow your audience steadily on LinkedIn, in this article I will share my strategy and tactics to help you grow LinkedIn in 2024. I will share the hacks that I've used and that impressed me and also the ones that didn't work and disappointed me — to save your time and optimise your efforts for building your profile. Let's start?

First, let me briefly share my story and LinkedIn strategy.

In the summer of 2023 I've decided to launch my own marketing agency and grow my LinkedIn to find clients. Back then I had around 500-600 connections. Those were mostly people from my old jobs and career communities. I've had the profile since 2013, so naturally in 10 years I've collected these connections.

I've only reached my first 1,000 subscribers in January 2024. The journey from 500 to 1,000 took me approximately five months. So did the journey from 1,000 to 2,000 followers. In the next five months I'm expecting to hit approximately 4,000 — so let's see if I reach this goal by the end of 2024.

Since I am focused on quality connections, I only add relevant people from tech: founders, CEOs, product managers, and other people from the same field.

I noticed that when you reach large quantities of people, you start to lose quality. When I add a lot of people and do not contact with them, they lack personal connections, they do not follow my content, they do not like it, the engagement and the views drop — so my follower number with this approach actually decreased.

The key point here is to find balance. I want to grow, but I don't want to grow too fast — where I have this big number on top of my profile, but nobody's really looking at my posts. That would be useless.

And I'm pretty sure that my new approach can bring me c. 300 new connections per month.

So which tactics have helped me gain followers and post views? And here I'm talking about expanding your LinkedIn audience.

The first tactic is actual posting. I've started doing that approximately a year ago. You might be thinking, "Ok, Ms. Obvious, but what to post about?”

Personal stories

The number 1 type of stories that have been catching my subscribers attention the most are personal stories. For example, when I ran a marathon, I shared that on LinkedIn and this post is still top three of all my posts.

Even when you're making a useful (expert) post, it's nice to add a personal touch to it. For example, right now I'm not only sharing the best LinkedIn tactics, but also what I've been using and what results I've been getting.

Recently I ran an experiement to make my story go viral with several tactics that I'm sharing with you as well. Additionally, I asked people in the comments to share what posts they've got viral.

Top tips from other people were controversial topic & showing numbers, especially large sums of money (either large overall, like a million dollar, or just insane, like a croissant for $1 ,000).

Adding a picture or a gif, as well as short videos were next tips — those I still didn't test out myself. But when I do later on, I will tell you if it works.

Achievements

The number two post type that works for growing your LinkedIn is achievements. Nobody especially likes this type on LinkedIn, but if you are combining your boasting, your achievement with some insight on how to achieve the same thing + add some personal take (what you felt, circumstances, obstacles that you overcame) — this makes the story more compelling.

So don't be afraid to boast, just share some interesting juicy details that people are interested in.

These are the splashes of attention to my account, when I shared an important event with my audience (the views are per day, so it's not the same as the total views of the post that was published on that day).

Useful posts

Think of a post that you have recently saved or reposted. I'm almost sure you have done so with posts that bring insight, value, and which are most likely some kind of tips or a bucket list.

People love bucket lists like “top 10 ways to grow your LinkedIn”, “top five ways to boost your profile”, “top five SEO tips”, etc. For example, I have a great post with great statistics on improving the LinkedIn profile in five minutes.

The next tactic that worked for me is commenting.

LinkedIn algorithm works the way that if I engage with your post if I write you a comment, this post is gonna be shown in my user's feed. it would be mentioned as “Jane commented this” and shown to my followers.

So, if a larger profile engages with your content, for example, if I have 2,000 followers and you only have 500, it's gonna give you an instant boost.

I've noticed this technique works when I've built a connection with a marketer Natalia Panfilova, and she started supporting me with her friendly comments. Thank you, Natalia!

And when I was doing my experiment, I've built exactly on this mechanic. This is the post that I've posted on virality and this is the largest viewed post on my account.

It reached more than 2,000 views and the mechanic I've used was asking several people with a large following to comment and repost this post. I also asked them to do so in the first hours of existence of this post.

This is very important because the algorithm shows it to so many people only initially and then it analyzes how it performs. The algorithm understood that it needs to boost it to more people. And this is how we got to virality.

It didn't boost me to huge thousands of views, which I secretly would be happy about, but it still gained more views than I have followers — so technically it was viral.

So, if what you're posting about is an important topic for you, if it's an important announcement, please ask people with large following to comment on your post in the first hours. You can DM me on LinkedIn. If my account is larger than yours or approximately the same number of followers as yours, I would be happy to help.

The next tactic to boost views from audience that doesn't know anything about you and is not related to you is groups. When I post, I get views in my own account plus I get extra 30%-50% (sometimes even 100%) in groups!

When I make a post, LinkedIn asks me if I wanna repost it and suggests a relevant group to the topic. Here make sure that you are subscribed to groups relevant to your topic beforehand. This way you can use LinkedIn suggestions or you can manually choose to repost your post to groups.

This is acrually number one hack that helps me grow the followers. This is not a big secret, but not all people realize this. To grow on LinkedIn, you can manually add people to your contacts. You just ask them to establish a connection and most people accept (it depends on your profile, how credible you seem to be & how active you are).

Two nice ways to do that is to look "by company” and “by similar people”. People similar to this profile and you go to “others” and the algorithm shows you similar profiles. In this way you can mass connect — and that's it.

Since you can personalize only five messages per month and I sometimes send a couple of hundreds "connect” requests per week (and even the paid version doesn't solve the problem!) — this is what I do. I do not personalize the request except for some super rare connections that I cherish.

Instead, I just hit “connect” and then I go to the person's profile and read their posts. If they have interesting posts, I'm happy leave some comments. And this is how I start the conversation with the person — there is no limit on comments.

If you are growing on LinkedIn, make sure you add a reasonable amount of people on LinkedIn weekly. I think the limit is close to 150-200 people per week. And the good news that you can do this up to 30,000 connections. This is the maximum amount of connections you can have on LinkedIn. But when we get to 30,000, we can find other ways.

So, that's pretty much it about helpful tactics. And now let's move to the hacks that disappointed me.

First I will share 2 most useless hacks, and then the 2 that were okay-ish.

The most disappointing one that I actually expected to be a failure is the time of posting. It is really useless once you are within the weekdays. I've made an experiment on this one. I've posted one post at 9 am and later on removed it (it doesn’t affect the algorithm!) and posted it again in the evening — it got strictly the same amount of views in the first 20 hours or so.

Yet, I've noticed that the situation could be different on Saturday and Sunday. So if you don't want low engagements, just please do not post on Saturday and Sunday. Or better say, do not post your important posts on those days because there are much less people on the platform during weekends.

But those who get less content, have a higher chance to see your post. So sometimes it can work the other way around on Sundays.

The second thing that disappointed me and people around LinkedIn is the paid status. I'm sure it brings interesting opportunities for the HR matters. But regarding the engagement and following, it does not make any difference if you have a paid account or not (at least I didn't see any difference).

Now 2 tactics that are so-so. And the first one is hashtags.

Sometimes they bring new people. For example, when I posted the news on my first YouTube video, I added the hashtag #YouTube and I saw that people subscribed to me. Unfortunately, those were the YouTube marketers that wanted me to buy their promotion packages, but still those were people related to the YouTube topic.

But sometimes I add hashtags and I don't see any difference or any new people coming from those hashtags.

If you choose to use hashtags to experiment with them, pay attention to how many followers a hashtag has. The number of followers of this hashtag will give you an idea which hashtag is better versus the other one.

Btw, I haven't found a proper 'hashtag research tool' on LinkedIn. To get here, I've clicked on any hashtag in any post. And if I need to check another hashtag, I just type it within the link address. Crazy! If you know better way, please share!

And the final thing that's controversial is the badge. Yes, I've got my top voice badge this February. If you are interested how I've got it, I made a post on LinkedIn on this. Let me know in the comments if you need a further tip on how to get a LinkedIn Top Voice Badge in your topic!

It's mostly a vanity thing for meeting new people. When a person sees your profile, they pay attention to number of followers, and the badge. And it's a completely different story if a person has 200 people versus 20,000 people on their following.

But it doesn't increase views. So if you have a badge, LinkedIn would not recommend you to people, or promote you in any way.

These were my LinkedIn best working and non-working-at-all hacks for LinkedIn growth in 2024. I share much more detail on growing your socials and start-ups on my LinedIn page. So if you are interested, let's connect on LinkedIn and grow together.

See you next week.

I will post a link to my profile as usual in the description section. If you want to connect on LinkedIn, please do. If you need to shout out a promotion on LinkedIn, if you are developing your account, let me know. I will be happy to engage with your posts. Thank you for reading this newsletter! Please subscribe to Discover with Jane channel, if you are not, and see you next week!

Best,

Jane