At a networking event last month someone told me his follower count before he told me what he does for a living. Twelve thousand, he said, like it settled something. I asked him how many client conversations he had started this year and he changed the subject.
I get why the number is tempting. Online, you can measure everything: clicks, views, reactions, and followers. Numbers feel like proof, and a big one feels like success. Nothing wrong with measuring. But the market has gone completely bananas on this one specific number.
Let me just be real to you: no one gives a Fuck about your reach except you and your marketing department
Anyone can fake the number
Ten followers is worse than a thousand, sure. But a thousand followers tells you nothing, because a thousand followers is something you can buy for the price of lunch. Bots, engagement pods, a “like and win an iPad” campaign, take your pick. Ten minutes and a few euros and your number goes up.
And those followers will never read a thing you write, never reply, never buy. Which was the entire point of showing up on these platforms in the first place. You wanted people who’d eventually work with you. You bought a number that guarantees the opposite.
The “but a big following makes me look credible” argument doesn’t hold either. When did you last check the follower count of someone whose work you actually rate? Yes, that is correct, never! You trusted them for what they said, not for how many people were listening.
The algorithm agrees with me
A big, dead audience doesn’t just sit there doing nothing. It now even works against you.
Every feed, LinkedIn included, decides who sees your post based on their interests, and on how the first slice of your audience responds. Post something and a fraction of your followers see it, and if they engage, the platform reads that as “this is worth showing to more people” and widens the reach. If they don’t engage, it stops showing you to anyone.
So if you’ve padded your account with bought or bribed followers who feel nothing when you post, you’ve trained the algorithm to think your content is worthless. The number under your name went up, and the number of people who actually see your work went down. You paid to become less visible.
Congratulations.
What the number should be
A follower count is only worth anything when you earned it, one real person at a time, because you said something useful and they wanted more. Those are the people who actually open what you write and reply, and some of them, when the timing’s right, book the call.
And it’s usually smaller than you’d think. You operate in a narrow slice of the market, which means a “small” audience of the right few hundred people can put you in front of most of the buyers who matter. One person who runs the kind of firm you want to work with, reading your post and thinking “finally, someone who gets it,” beats ten thousand people you’ll never hear from again.
This was true in 2022 and it’s truer now than it’s ever been. AI means anyone can flood the feed with infinite content and buy all the reach they want, so the numbers mean even less than they did. The one thing that can’t be faked, bought, or generated is a real person deciding they trust you. That’s the only metric that ends in a contract.
So the next time you catch yourself checking the follower count, yours or anyone else’s, ask the better question: how many of them would take your call?
Chase that number instead.