# How to get more followers on LinkedIn: useful posts and a Follow button > How to get more followers on LinkedIn: post useful first-person content three times a week, make Follow your main button, comment early, track growth monthly. Source: https://linkedinlikes.com/blog/how-to-get-more-followers-on-linkedin ยท Updated: 2026-11-12 ## Key takeaways - Every connection follows you automatically, so your follower count includes your connections; connections cap at 30,000 while followers have no cap. - Turning on "Make follow primary" under Visibility puts Follow in place of Connect on your profile. - Below a few thousand followers, commenting on bigger accounts brings more new followers per hour than posting. - New accounts (0-500 followers) can aim for 8-15% growth a month; established accounts of 2,500-10,000 grow at a healthy 3-6%. - Most people need three to six months of steady work to reach their first 1,000 followers. To get more followers on LinkedIn, post useful first-person content from your personal profile at least three times a week, switch your main profile button to Follow, and comment on larger accounts in your field. People follow when your posts are specific enough to trust and following you is the obvious next click. ## What does it take to get more followers on LinkedIn? Three habits cover most of it: regular posts written from your own experience, Follow set as the main button, and less attention to the follower count as a vanity number. Your own posts are a stage you control. Commenting under bigger accounts puts you on their stage, in front of people who would never come across your posts otherwise. ### The growth starts to build on itself around month 2-3 - Followers come from a short chain: reach puts you in front of people, and a clear profile turns their attention into a follow. - The most common reason people follow someone on LinkedIn is content that is useful week after week. - While you have fewer than a few thousand followers, an hour of commenting brings more new followers than an hour of posting, since your own reach is limited by the audience you have not built yet. ## Do LinkedIn connections count as followers? Yes. Every connection follows you automatically, so connections are included in your follower count. If reach is what you want, followers are the number to watch. A follower gets a one-way feed of your public posts, with no limit on how many you can have and no right to message you. ### To see how many people follow you without being connected, subtract your connections from your followers - Connections stop at 30,000, and after that followers are the only way to keep growing. - Following does not create a connection. A follower who is not connected cannot see your contact details, cannot message you freely and does not show up in your connection list. - LinkedIn distributes your posts based on how both groups respond, but only followers can keep growing without a ceiling. If you want both, our guide on [how to get more connections on LinkedIn](https://linkedinlikes.com/blog/how-to-get-more-connections-on-linkedin) covers the other side. ## Why don't all your followers see your posts? An account with 8,000 followers who care about its topic can do better than one with 80,000 who do not. LinkedIn shows each post to part of your network first and keeps showing it only if those people stop and respond. Platform data shows that reach among your own followers fell from about 40-60% before 2025 to 10-20% now. ### Only about 31% of the average LinkedIn feed now comes from first-degree connections - No single reach figure counts as good, so track reach rate: unique reach divided by your follower count. - LinkedIn has never published the size of its test audience, even though figures like 5-10% or 8-12% of followers circulate widely online. - If the For You tab becomes where members spend most of their time, an executive with a few hundred followers could reach professionals who would never see their posts through connections. ## Which LinkedIn setting gets you more followers? Check "Make follow primary" under Visibility. If you want an audience more than a contact list, Follow should be the main action on your profile. A connection request creates a two-way commitment, counts toward a cap on connections and asks a stranger to make a decision when they only wanted to read more of your posts. LinkedIn removed the on/off switch for creator mode in March 2024. ### LinkedIn says the change can take up to 24 hours to appear - On mobile the setting is the same, reached a different way: press your profile photo, then the Settings gear, then Visibility, then Followers, and turn "Make follow primary" on. - For a founder who posts, letting Everyone on LinkedIn follow you is almost always the right choice. - Visitors who want to connect can still find Connect in the More menu on your profile, which keeps connection requests manageable. ## How does your profile turn visitors into followers? Half of profile visitors decide whether to follow within about 8 seconds, so a clear profile matters. The Featured section sits right under About and is often the first place people see your actual work. Anything you feature stays near the top of your profile until you replace it, which is why it counts for more than any single post. ### On mobile, where most profile views happen, visitors usually see the first one or two featured items without swiping - A post that already did well with your feed audience is a safer choice for profile visitors than a new post nobody has reacted to yet. - To feature a post, open it in the feed or on your profile, click the three-dot menu at its top right and choose Feature on top of profile. - Featuring a strong post from six months ago does not show it to your network again, so do not expect extra impressions from it. The [LinkedIn profile analyzer](https://linkedinlikes.com/linkedin-profile-analyzer) shows what a visitor sees first, and our guide to the [LinkedIn profile headline](https://linkedinlikes.com/blog/linkedin-profile-headline) helps with the line under your name. ## What content makes people follow you on LinkedIn? Nobody needs to follow you for posts anyone could have written. The content that builds a personal brand fastest is content only you could produce: a real story, a precise how-to, or a view you can defend. People do not follow accounts they cannot predict, and the posts that bring follows read like lived experience. ### Creators who stay within 2 to 3 topics do better than those spread over 6 or more, even when the latter post more often - "B2B SaaS marketing for early-stage founders" is a niche readers recognise themselves in and follow you for. - Post a contrarian view only if you can defend it in the replies. - Every personal post should tell the reader what to do differently after reading it. ## How do comments bring your first 1,000 followers? Most of the first 1,000 followers find you through your comments, and fewer through your own posts. The fastest honest route there is to comment more than you post for the first three months. A comment on someone else's busy post reaches their audience, people who have never heard of you. After three or four sightings under creators they follow, they start following you without being asked. ### Across 261,137 real comments, one posted in the first 30 minutes earned 391 impressions on average, against 104 after 24 hours - Pick creators in your niche with 5,000-50,000 followers: big enough for reach, small enough that your comment is not lost among hundreds of others. - Write the comment as if it were a short post: add a real idea, a counterexample or a specific story. "Great insight" adds nothing. - Around 1,000 followers the balance shifts, and your own posts start to count for more than your comments. The [LinkedIn comment generator](https://linkedinlikes.com/linkedin-comment-generator) gives you a draft to rewrite in your own words when you are stuck. ## Do collaborative posts help you gain followers? They help only when your co-authors have separate networks that matter to you. Once the last collaborator accepts, the post goes out at the same moment to the followers of everyone involved, with all names at the top. Tagging someone is different: a collaborative post is one piece of content attributed to all the authors. There is still no evidence that LinkedIn gives collaborative posts extra reach just for using the format. ### LinkedIn members and Company Pages can invite up to five collaborators per post - Choose people your audience wants to hear from, and skip people who do exactly your job. - Because every collaborator has to accept, agree on timing in advance; a cold invite can sit unnoticed. - Only the original author can edit the post or manage collaborators, so decide who owns the final text. ## Does a LinkedIn newsletter bring followers? When you publish the first edition, LinkedIn invites your connections and followers to subscribe. Anyone who subscribes automatically becomes a follower if they were not one already. Each new edition reaches subscribers through three channels at once: a push notification in the mobile app, an alert inside LinkedIn and an email. ### In August 2025 LinkedIn opened newsletters to all members with no follower minimum (company pages still need more than 150 followers) - Most creators convert only 1-5% of followers into subscribers. - If you cannot publish at least every couple of weeks, a strong Featured section will likely do more for you than a newsletter that stops after four editions. - You never get subscribers' email addresses. More on this in [how to get more newsletter subscribers on LinkedIn](https://linkedinlikes.com/blog/how-to-get-more-newsletter-subscribers-on-linkedin). ## How do you bring followers from outside LinkedIn? Some people who would follow you on LinkedIn will never find you there on their own. Any place where you already have an audience can send you LinkedIn followers once the path is visible. Every profile has its own follow link: open your profile, then Contact info, then the sharing section at the bottom, where you can copy a plain URL or an embed code. Linking to your general profile and hoping people find the right button loses most of that traffic. ### In the LinkedIn mobile app, press the QR icon in the search bar to show or save your profile QR code for meeting people in person - If you are on Instagram, TikTok or Substack, your link in bio is a natural spot for LinkedIn, more so when LinkedIn is where you post most. - Any place you are introduced: podcast bios, speaker pages, guest post bylines. - Audiences overlap more than you expect, and people often just need to be told where else to find you. ## How do company pages get more followers? Content shared by employees reaches 561% more people than the same content posted by a company page. Ask employees to link their profiles to the Page, reshare their posts, send invitations to people who already react to the Page, and publish on a steady schedule. A free company page gets 50 invitations a month, shared by all admins, and each employee who is not an admin can invite up to 30 first-degree connections a month to follow the page. ### The invitation allowance resets on the 1st of each month; an accepted invitation comes back to the pool, an ignored one does not - Passing 150 followers matters early, because only then does LinkedIn start suggesting your page to non-followers in their feeds. - The Notify Employees button has to be pressed by hand after every post, even when a third-party scheduler published it. - People who reacted to or commented on the Page's posts without following it are the most likely to accept. For more, read [how to get free LinkedIn company page followers](https://linkedinlikes.com/get-free-linkedin-company-page-followers). ## How many LinkedIn followers is a good number? Fewer than 0.5% of LinkedIn's 1 billion users have more than 10,000 followers. No benchmark fits everyone, and the follower count matters less than it once did. A few thousand followers who care about your topics are enough for inbound opportunities to start. Inbound usually begins somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 followers, and growth starts to build on itself above roughly 5,000. ### Follower growth rate is how fast your audience grows over a period, usually measured monthly - New accounts (0-500 followers) can aim for 8-15% a month. - For established accounts (2,500-10,000 followers), 3-6% a month is healthy. - Company pages usually grow more slowly, at around 1 to 5% a month. The [LinkedIn follower growth calculator](https://linkedinlikes.com/linkedin-follower-growth-calculator) works out your monthly rate from two follower counts. ## How do you track follower growth on LinkedIn? LinkedIn now shows exactly who followed you from a specific post. Each month, write down your total follower count on the same day, either the first or the last of the month. Add a column for growth in percent: the net gain divided by last month's total, times 100. Going from 500 to 550 followers is a 10% gain. ### On desktop, go to Me, View Profile, the Analytics section, then Show all analytics - Since June 2026 LinkedIn has been rolling out a split of your reach into inside and outside your network, the closest thing to a count of potential new followers who saw a post. - Note whether profile views jumped when a particular post did well. - The Export button saves the view as an .XLSX file. ## How long does it take to get 1,000 followers on LinkedIn? For most people the first 1,000 followers take three to six months of steady work, and the first 300 are by far the hardest. Reaching 5,000 takes 6 to 9 months of regular publishing, and 10,000 takes 12 to 18 months. The growth rate falls at every stage while the number of new followers each month keeps rising, which is why the account feels slower and performs better at the same time. ### A typical pace is 3 to 5 posts a week plus about 30 minutes of commenting a day, kept up over months - Starting below 500 followers, 20 to 80 new followers a month is realistic for the first 90 days. - 10,000 followers takes roughly 250 posts at 3 to 5 a week. - No published study fixes a timeline, and anyone quoting an exact number of days is guessing. ## What should you do this week? Turn on "Make follow primary", feature one post that already did well, and spend 30 minutes a day commenting on creators in your niche with 5,000-50,000 followers. If you want more people to see your profile while you build the habit, [LinkedInLikes](https://linkedinlikes.com/linkedin/follow) lets you post a follow request for your profile, and members decide by hand from their own accounts whether to follow. ## More articles - [Build an AI content system for LinkedIn from one empty folder (full 2026 setup guide)](https://linkedinlikes.com/blog/how-to-build-an-ai-content-system-for-linkedin) - [The 2027 LinkedIn marketing playbook](https://linkedinlikes.com/blog/the-2027-linkedin-marketing-playbook) ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I increase LinkedIn followers for free? Post useful first-person content at least three times a week, set Follow as your main profile button, comment early on posts by creators with 5,000-50,000 followers in your niche, and feature your best post on your profile. ### Do my connections count as followers? Yes. Every connection follows you automatically. To count followers who are not connected, subtract your connections from your total followers. ### How do I make Follow the main button on my LinkedIn profile? Go to Settings, then Visibility, then Followers, and turn on "Make follow primary". LinkedIn says the change can take up to 24 hours to show. ### How long does it take to get 1,000 followers on LinkedIn? Three to six months of steady work for most people. 5,000 followers usually takes 6 to 9 months and 10,000 takes 12 to 18 months. ### What is a good monthly follower growth rate on LinkedIn? 8-15% a month for new accounts with 0-500 followers, 3-6% for established accounts with 2,500-10,000 followers, and around 1-5% for company pages. ### How many people can a company page invite to follow it? A free company page gets 50 invitations a month, shared by all admins. Each employee who is not an admin can invite up to 30 first-degree connections a month.