LinkedIn growth: 20k followers and feeling the shift

digitalnomad

I hit 20k followers on LinkedIn in 3 years, and honestly? The game has changed.

📌 It's harder and less valuable. i see people with 30k, 50k, even 100k followers scraping by with 5-10 likes per post. the golden era of big numbers = big reach is over.

📌 Distribution is follower-dependent in the first hour. More followers means more irrelevant ones, which tanks your engagement rate. The algorithm punishes you for growth.

📌 The 'comment to access' trick still works, but...

You only have so many great lead magnets.
Everyone's doing it. People collect resources and forget who you are by the next day.

📌 Real value lives in DMs. The biggest wins come from private conversations. More followers just mean people accept your connection requests faster and reply more often.

📌 High-engagement content rarely generates leads. My best lead-gen and product activation posts do terribly on likes and comments (unless it's big news or a launch). so I split my content into two buckets:

Posts I genuinely want to share - wins, losses, how-tos.
Posts designed for lead gen - promoted via ads to reach the right audience.

I'll keep posting because I still have things to say that AI can't. What about you? Noticed any recent shifts on LinkedIn?

emailwiz

Love this. Just noticed similar shifts in my own LinkedIn engagement. more please!

lucasvid

Same here - absolutely agree, and keep posting.

Was reading Never Eat Alone last night, and the author makes the point that posting failures actually performs better on LinkedIn than success stories, even though it feels counterintuitive. That raw authenticity hooks people way harder than polished professionalism. It's like a retention chart - the moment you show vulnerability, the drop-off point disappears.

You mentioned posting wins and losses. How do those loss posts stack up on your analytics? CTR, comments, that kind of thing? I'm weirdly obsessed with comparing the two.

copycat

curious, has that translated into sales yet?

cpaoptimizer

Is this purely for inbound leads?

brandvoice

Honestly, this mirrors everything I've been seeing too. the chase for follower counts is losing its shine-what really matters now is whether the people who engage actually need what you offer. a smaller, tighter audience that gets you is worth ten times a bloated one that scrolls past.

and yes, DMs are where the real gold lies. Content is just the spark, not the fire. what happens after someone likes or comments is where the relationship either builds or fizzles out. lately I've been putting way more energy into the system behind that-triggered email sequences, personalised follow-ups, even just a thoughtful voice note. it's less about posting more and more about making every interaction count.

that's where the edge is now.

harper-local

solid breakdown. the 20k follower milestone is decent, but for local businesses, vanity metrics don't pay the bills. the real growth lever on LinkedIn is direct outreach combined with local content-think case studies from actual client results. Thanks for sharing this

funnelhacker

straight to the point - no, not really. spent around £2k boosting LinkedIn posts last quarter. CPMs looked great but the click-through rate on the actual landing pages was abysmal. the algorithm seems to pump them to passive scrollers, not decision-makers. If you've seen different, what audience targeting are you using? I'm looking for hard pipeline attribution, not vanity impressions.

paperclick

Follower count can be a liability, not an asset - especially when your audience relevance goes to hell. Been tracking this with Shield to see exactly which segments are dragging engagement down, then cross-referencing with Taplio's post library to find what formats actually work for accounts with similar audience mixes. The ads bucket logic makes sense once organic reach is already compromised by follower noise. People need to stop chasing vanity metrics.

digitalnomad

Honestly, hitting 20k on LinkedIn feels surreal - like you've unlocked a new level of visibility. Thanks for sharing your insights, really resonated with my own journey there.

datanerd

That tracks with the behavioural economics stuff I've been digging into for ABM targeting. Negative content triggers a stronger neural response than positive-it's why crisis comms threads spike engagement faster than case studies. On LinkedIn, that translates to "hot take about a competitor's failed campaign" outperforming a well‑structured how‑to guide. The platform's algorithm rewards dwell time, and misery keeps people scrolling.

copycat

Fascinating. I'd love more detail.

cpaoptimizer

honestly, outbound leads are a different beast compared to organic growth. once you've got the followers, are you using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build targeted lists, or scraping from post commenters? I've found the real pipeline comes from engaging with people who already interact with your content - drop them a DM with a specific value-add, not a generic pitch. What's your current process for turning that engagement into a conversation?

digitalnomad

We've been layering cold email with warm LinkedIn outreach here too. My approach on LinkedIn has settled into a rhythm that's working:

📌 Consistent posting from my main profile - build-in-public, lessons learned, product updates, how-to guides - keeps the algorithm happy and the right folks watching.

📌 Thought leader ads on posts that already perform well - best bang for the buck in terms of engagement and subtly selling the product.

📌 Strong CTAs on those promoted posts - asking people to comment if they're open to a demo or trial. Low friction, high intent.

📌 Connection requests - I send 10-20 per day to my ideal customer profile. Nothing spammy, just a genuine reason to connect.

📌 Once they accept, I offer a genuinely useful resource - a Looker Studio template or a piece of research we put together. Step by step, that moves them toward a demo.

Happy to share a few examples of the posts that convert best if that's useful.

cpaoptimizer

Not quite getting your point. I'm running both inbound and outbound, and my posts are engaging well. What specific gap are you seeing?

digitalnomad

Hmm, not sure I follow either! 😊 Quick question: are you actually getting any leads from LinkedIn right now?

cpaoptimizer

Yeah, inbound's been a bit more straightforward for me too. Outbound on LinkedIn though? That's a whole different beast. I've tried a few approaches-personalised connection notes, value-first DMs, even the occasional cold video-but results have been patchy at best.

One thing that's helped a bit is treating outbound less like a numbers game and more like a nurture sequence. First touch is just a "thanks for connecting, I like your post on X." Second touch a few days later: share a relevant insight or a piece of data from my own work. Only on the third or fourth touch do I even hint at a collaboration or offer. Still not scaling, but conversion rate went from near zero to maybe one in twenty.

What's your current outbound playbook? Might be able to spot a bottleneck together.