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How to get more followers on LinkedIn

By Miles Burke · Updated 10 October 2026 · 7 minute read

Where followers come from

Nobody follows an account they have not seen. New followers arrive by a short chain of events: someone sees your name on a post or a comment, finds it interesting enough to look at your profile, and decides there will be more worth reading. Each link in that chain is something you can work on.

• Being seen: your posts, and your comments on other people's posts.
• Being worth a look: your headline, which appears beside everything you write.
• Being worth following: a profile and a run of recent posts that show what you will keep writing about.

People you connect with follow you automatically, so new connections add to your follower count as well.

Seven things that bring followers

1. Pick a few subjects and stay on them

People follow for more of the same. If your last ten posts cover ten unrelated things, a visitor cannot tell what following you would bring. Three or four subjects you return to is enough.

2. Post on a steady rhythm

Each post is another chance to be seen by someone new. Two or three posts a week, kept up for months, does more than a burst followed by silence. See how often to post.

3. Comment on bigger accounts in your field

A useful comment on a widely read post is seen by that author's audience, most of whom have never heard of you. It is the quickest way to reach people beyond your own followers, and it costs a few minutes.

4. Make your headline say what you write about

Your headline is shown beside every post and comment. "Marketing Manager at Acme" tells a stranger nothing about why to follow you. "I write about pricing for small software companies" does.

5. Give visitors something to see

When someone does click through, your profile has a few seconds to convince them. Use the About section to say what you post about and for whom, and pin your best posts to Featured.

6. Make it easy to follow

LinkedIn lets you choose whether the main button on your profile says Connect or Follow. If growing an audience matters more to you than growing a contact list, make it Follow. A stranger is more willing to follow than to ask to connect, and following needs no approval from you.

1. Open Settings and Privacy and choose Visibility.
2. Under "Visibility of your LinkedIn activity", select Followers.
3. Set "Who can follow you" to Everyone on LinkedIn.
4. Switch Make follow primary on.

People can still ask to connect with you: the Connect option moves under the More button on your profile. Followers see your posts, but they cannot message you directly unless you are also connected.

7. Repeat the posts that brought followers

Some posts bring followers and some bring only impressions. Your own figures show which, and that is where the next section comes in.

How to see and measure your follower growth

• Your total: on the analytics Overview page, under "Total followers", with the change from the week before.
• Who they are: open your analytics by clicking "Post impressions" under your name on the home page, then choose "Audience analytics" in the menu on the left.
• Day by day: the spreadsheet LinkedIn lets you export has a FOLLOWERS sheet listing new followers for every day of the past year. See how to export your LinkedIn analytics.

The daily list is the useful one. Line it up against the dates of your posts and you can see which posts were followed by a jump in new followers. Look at what those posts had in common, the subject, the format, how they opened, and write more like them.

Two things to keep in mind when reading it:

• Reach and followers are different results. A post can travel a long way and bring nobody, and a post seen by few can bring several. Count followers gained, not only impressions.
• Who matters more than how many. Check the job titles, industries and locations of your followers against the people you want to reach. A smaller audience of the right people is worth more than a large one of the wrong people.

What is a good rate of growth?

There is no figure that fits everyone, because it depends on where you start, how often you post and how large your field is. The comparison that works is with your own past: is your typical week bringing more new followers than it did three months ago? If it is, what you are doing is working.

Expect a steady trickle with occasional jumps. Most weeks will look alike, and now and then a post that travels well will bring a month's worth at once.

What to avoid

• Buying followers. It breaks LinkedIn's rules, and the accounts you get are not readers. Your posts are then shown to people who never respond, which lowers your engagement rate and tells you nothing about what works.
• Follow-for-follow schemes. They fill your audience with people who are not interested in your subject, for the same result.
• Mass connection requests. LinkedIn limits how many you can send, and strangers who accept a request they did not want rarely read what you post.
• Chasing the count. Followers are a means to something: clients, opportunities, a reputation. Keep an eye on that, not only on the number.

For turning an audience into work, see how to use LinkedIn for business.

Common questions