Soon after lawyer Paul Verrico posted a plea on LinkedIn for hand sanitiser for his cancer charity in March 2020, the chief operating officer of a large Hong Kong energy company offered to help.
During their discussions, the COO said it was a shame Verrico’s team at law firm Evershed Sutherlands did not operate in Hong Kong. “Links were made and we ended up working on the largest safety consultancy project the team had ever done,” Verrico recalls. “Yin and Yang, almost.”
The outcome was made possible by Verrico’s large and engaged network on LinkedIn. He has more than 9,000 followers.
Verrico is one of the platform’s superusers — professionals that have amassed networks sometimes reaching tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, which they use to build their brand.
For these users, LinkedIn is no longer just a recruitment site but a space to publish content relating to their work, to self-promote, share expertise and seek out business opportunities. Many are putting in the hours and effort equivalent to a part-time job to maintain their pages. Some have even recruited advisers to shape their LinkedIn strategies.
The shift reflects LinkedIn’s aim to reach deeper into people’s professional lives and take advantage of the hustle and self-promotion that is now a common feature of many jobs. The platform says 85 per cent of FTSE 100 chief executives now have a presence on LinkedIn, up from 12 per cent in 2023.
“LinkedIn is no longer a job search platform, it’s a business networking platform,” says Jasmin Alić. He has more than 300,000 followers, and coaches people on “how to build a brand”, through one-to-one sessions and — of course — his LinkedIn page, Link Up. “Five or ten years ago it used to be, hey we received your CV. Today it’s: we saw your content, can we book a call. It went from seeking out opportunities to opportunities coming to you.”
Alić is one of a thriving industry of influencers, consultants and advisers who help LinkedIn users, sometimes for a fee, to grow large and successful followings. It is not for the faint of heart. In a characteristically peppy post, Alić warns users that building a presence takes “mad time and effort”. His advice includes making 50 comments per day on other users’ posts — he suggests targeting peers and bigger influencers — and posting several times a week, while also publishing “ONLY if you have something to say”.
Dan Roth, editor-in-chief and vice-president at LinkedIn, is a little sceptical of such how-to guides. He advises users to “build trust and a reputation by being authentic and honest”, echoing the language of many experts in how to build followings.
Yet in the 14 years he has been at the company he has helped introduce many features for brand building. These have included a “creator mode” that helps with content, algorithmic tweaks that prioritise relevance and expertise in users’ feeds, and more tools for publishing video.
“We are seeing people, over the last couple of years, increasingly use LinkedIn as a way to . . . build their voice,” Roth says. “You’ve got to think about . . . what’s going to get you hired, what’s going to get people to decide they want to work with you. This idea of building your voice is so critical to navigating the working world today, and that is what’s driving all of this.”
Still, highly engaged users are unusual. Mark Williams, who runs a podcast giving advice to LinkedIn users, says: “The huge majority have absolutely no idea what they’re doing — many of them just see it as a jobs site.” Alić adds that “a million followers [on Instagram] is like 100,000 on LinkedIn”.
LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2bn, says comments have increased 37 per cent year-on-year, while video creation has doubled. More than five years ago, the company gave users the option to follow — or be followed by — other users. This is different to “connections”, which are capped at 30,000 — an attempt by LinkedIn to encourage users to keep close networks with people they “know personally and professionally”.
“With lots of followers you will have that content visibility . . . it’s one direction,” says Margo Laz, a consultant. “With connections, it’s two-fold communication”. Her agency, Kudos Narratives, mainly collaborates with accounts that make Verrico’s look tiny: she classes 11,000-50,000 as “micro” or “niche” influencer status, 50,000-100,000 “mid tier”.
Mark Somers, the head of a private wealth management and executive search firm, has 30,000 followers, and says he has at times hit the limit of connections. “The reason why having a big number is important is that one thing our clients expect from us is having a large, vibrant active network,” he says.
He employs a consultant to plan his LinkedIn strategy and encourages staff members to contribute posts and “provocative content”.
That chimes with the advice from Richard van der Blom, a LinkedIn coach with 230,000 followers, who says he tells corporate clients to empower employees to use the platform themselves. Legal marketing consultant Simon Marshall found some leading lawyers had a reach far greater than the companies they work for.
Some users suggest the quest for followers has led to a decline in the quality of posting.
Alison Taylor, a business school professor and author, says that after her LinkedIn following passed 15,000, her experience got worse. Where before she had a focused following of colleagues, she began to interact more with people who viewed her as a public figure. This resulted in a “context collapse” that meant she was criticised by people who knew little about her field, while she ended up wading through posts from them.
“There were a lot of people asking why haven’t you commented on this or that — people jumping into comments to boost their own stuff, lots more trolls and ad hominem attacks,” Taylor says. “My feed is now a mess.”
She believes the “sweet spot” for followers is 5,000-15,000. A broader audience can result in posts that are less thoughtful and specialist. “I see the urge to dumb down and converge to the medium [so] everyone ends up with bland posting.”
Christine Armstrong, a workplace researcher with 19,000 LinkedIn followers, says the lack of anonymity means it is “not a cesspit”. But she admits to being turned off by some of the aggressive approaches to hitting high follower targets. “There’s a lot of witchcraft out there, people saying how to game it,” she says. “They all contradict each other.”
LinkedIn says it offers a wide array of tools to silence noise and personalise the experience, while users say they are able to “prune” their feeds by managing notifications.
And many users appreciate the broader networks. Helen Tupper, who previously worked in marketing and is now an author, says her LinkedIn profile is dominated by people who have read her articles, whereas in the past it was mostly people she knew.
“There are more ways to use it [today]. The idea of being a creator on LinkedIn was not a thing 15 years ago,” she says. Explore the possibilities and learn more at https://tx88.life/.
Tupper suggests “weak ties” — or distant acquaintances — are “better for your opportunities because they work in a world you don’t. LinkedIn can help you with that.”