The 2nd Time I Reached 67,000 LinkedIn Followers Ep 128

In this episode, I discuss that I reached 67,000 followers on LinkedIn for the 2nd time.

Main points I discuss:

• Follower Growth: I recently reached 67,000 followers on LinkedIn for the second time.
• LinkedIn's Data Purge: I experienced a drop in followers due to LinkedIn's removal of fake accounts in 2023
• Tracking Follower Growth: I use Shield Analytics (use my code to get 10% off: https://www.shieldapp.ai/?via=brenda) to track my follower data and identify trends.
• Quality Over Quantity: I focus on creating valuable content for my target audience rather than just aiming for a high follower count.
• Celebrating Milestones: I'm excited to continue growing my LinkedIn following and reaching new milestones.

Key Takeaways for YOU:

• Track your follower growth: Use tools like Shield Analytics to monitor your progress and identify trends.
• Focus on quality followers: Prioritize creating valuable content that resonates with your target audience.
• Celebrate milestones: Acknowledge your achievements and share them with your followers.
• Be patient: Building a strong following takes time and consistent effort.
• Learn from your data: Analyze your follower data to understand what works and what doesn't.

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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.

Visit mellermarketing.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:42

We reached 67,000 followers on LinkedIn this week Again. Yep, it's the second time this happened and I don't know if you're aware, but a while back LinkedIn had some issues with a bunch of fake accounts and those people with a lot of followers probably noticed there was a day where your follower count dropped substantially. Hey, this is Brenda Meller, and in today's episode I wanna talk to you a little bit about followers and what these analytics mean and a little bit of the backstory about how I achieved 67,000 followers on LinkedIn twice. First, what inspired this podcast, I should say, was actually a post I did today on LinkedIn, and the post was my weekly event post. I actually haven't done a weekly event post in the entire month of September of 2024 because I've been so rocking busy, but I'm catching my breath here as we're going into October and I started posting my events for the remainder of three months of the year and in the bottom of my post actually the top of my post I started with hey, I achieved 67,000 followers on LinkedIn this week and I put a little asterisk on it and I've been watching it. It's been increasing steadily over the past few weeks and months and I knew it was getting pretty close and I don't think I saw who the 67,000th person was. But I remember one day I went on and it was 66,900 and something and a few days later it was a little bit over 67,000. So I knew it was in the past week that this had happened and I put that in my post today, at the top with an asterisk, and at the bottom I put a little bit of the backstory about followers and how this had happened before. And there was a woman named Rose who commented on my post and she actually inspired me to do this podcast and she said how long have you been following? Or I think the question was actually how long have you been following your follower data and when did you start to accelerate your growth?

Speaker 1: 2:35

And for me I remember really trying to achieve, to get to a certain follower count. It's more. For me it's been just a data that helps me to assess my progress on the platform. I always try to make sure that when I'm posting on LinkedIn, I'm posting content that is valuable for my ideal target audience. Now that's changed a bit for me since 2006, when I joined LinkedIn originally and back then I was using it as a corporate employee and then I was using it as a job seeker, working while looking, and then I was using it as a corporate employee again, in rising up the ranks of a marketing department, overseeing a team and then launching my own business, starting in really 2017, towards the end of the year, where 2018 was when I went full-time. So I've been paying attention to it and answer to Rose's question for a while and I remember back in the days when I was like at the 8,000 level it was years and years ago, of course, but I really remember starting to watch it probably in 2018, when I launched my LinkedIn rock stars list, where I was following other people who were LinkedIn trainers and coaches and assessing my progress and measuring myself against them, and I was looking at week over week follower growth and I was doing it on a percentage basis, because you really can't compete with someone who has 5 million followers, but if you know that they've been increasing at 2% growth and you've been increasing at 10% growth, it makes you feel pretty good about your progress, right? And it also helps you to assess is my content valuable? Are people seeing my content as worthy enough to click on that follow button? And LinkedIn does have some data on followers, but they don't really do a great job. The good thing is, if you've been grabbing screen captures of your profile over the years, you probably have some historical look back at where you were in terms of follower counts. I'm sure LinkedIn has it someplace deep in their data archives, but I don't know if you can get to it For me.

Speaker 1: 4:23

I started using a service called Shield Analytics, which is a very low price I think it's like under a hundred bucks for the year and they give me access to my data as far back as my subscription, and I started subscribing to Shield I think it was in 2019. I'm looking at my data chart right now as I say this. I think it was 2019, in April of that year, and every year since then I've kept the subscription, which allows me to look at my followers. So when I first signed up for this Shield Analytics software, this was in approximately April of 2019. I think it was towards the end of March, but really April of 2019. I was at 17,000 followers and I look at my follower growth and it was pretty steady. It was increasing at a pretty good pace for a while and, as I look at, when did that data cliff happen, so to speak. I was probably increasing my follower count steadily through I want to say 2023. And I reached 67,000 followers the first time in about March, end of March, I think, mid to end of March of 2023. I'm looking at the data chart as I'm saying this right now and that kept increasing steadily until it was right around.

Speaker 1: 5:34

I'm looking at the data chart for the next number here, it was in July of 2023. So this past July was when overnight I went from it was well over 68,000 followers. At that point it might even have been higher than that. I went from that number to I dropped like 6,000 followers overnight, 62,777 followers. It dropped and I knew it was coming because LinkedIn had I'm not sure if they messaged us or they emailed us or sent us a notification, but they said, hey, we're purging a bunch of junk accounts. These are either spam or bots or inactive accounts. But they said, hey, we're purging a bunch of junk accounts. These are either spam or bots or inactive accounts, but we're going to be doing this. And I had heard from other coaches and trainers of LinkedIn that they had lost some follower accounts overnight as well. So I knew it was coming and you know, for me it's like the trash taking itself out. These weren't real connections to begin with, and the data wasn't really reflecting my followers, my true followers, so it was okay. Yeah, did it hurt a little bit losing 6,000 followers? Sure it did, but in the big scheme of things, those weren't real individuals anyway, so it didn't really matter to me all that much.

Speaker 1: 6:38

The second time I achieved the 67,000 followers was in late September of 2024. And I guess you could say from 2023 to 2024,. I did pretty good in terms of accelerating my follower growth, right, because I kept on the path of increasing followers over time, and I'm back there again. So we'll see. The next milestone I'm looking to hit will be 70,000 followers, hoping to get that over the next year, and I certainly will be celebrating that with a LinkedIn post. I believe it's really important to celebrate milestone achievements along the way. So I hope that you found this helpful.

Speaker 1: 7:13

If you are tracking your follower growth, I think it's a good thing to do just to assess whether your audience is finding your content valuable, and but always really keep in mind that you gotta make sure that your content is appealing for your ideal target audience, because, come end of the day. Who cares if you have 6000 followers or 67000 followers? If they're not the right people, you're not going to be achieving your LinkedIn goals right. So keep focused. Don't keep focused on the wrong numbers. There's a lot of vanity metrics out there and things like that, and really focusing in on are you delivering value of followers that I have. It's nice to see those. It's nice to celebrate those along the way, but I don't get all bummed out when I lose 6,000 followers overnight in the case of the LinkedIn data purge. So that's all I have to say about followers. I'll continue to look at that over time and hopefully this inspires you to start looking at your data and figure out the story that it tells you.

Speaker 1: 8:11

And, by the way, if you're interested in Shield Analytics, it is one of the tools that does require a Chrome extension, but, as far as I know, it's one of the tools that LinkedIn is allowing to occur, because Shield isn't posting on our behalf. Shield is not sending out automated invitations on our behalf. Shield is simply looking at our LinkedIn data and pulling it back in and putting in a format that we can use it. So I always like to give a little caveat for this, because LinkedIn hasn't listed Shield as one of its approved tools and it is using a Chrome extension, which can be a little bit of a gray area there, but I got to say my friends, I've been using this since 2019. So I've been using it for over five years myself, and there are many other people in the training and coaching community who specialize in LinkedIn who are also using Shield Analytics, and I don't think I've really heard of anyone having any issues with it because, come end of the day, it's really not violating terms of service like some of the other automated services out there are.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Using Shield is more just using at your data. From an analytical standpoint, linkedin might think that's competitive because they have their own set of analytics, but they don't get to the level of detail and the usefulness of sorting and showing this information. Shield does All right, and again thank you to Rose, who inspired today's podcast episode. I hope you find this helpful and I look forward to watching your LinkedIn progress. Have a great day.