#55: LinkedIn Followers / Vanity Metrics

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Exit Exit hey it's Dave. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. I like to do These little short ones every now and then. The thing on my mind today is LinkedIn and specifically LinkedIn followers. I see this conversation, I see people talk about it. You know what? I'm here to tell you that LinkedIn followers are not a vanity metric. That's right. LinkedIn followers are not a vanity metric. Here's why. The more followers that an account gets, that means that the more people that that account can reach. And here's why this is important. If you're using LinkedIn for a business standpoint, that means that when you promote a webinar, if I have a webinar that I'm doing, I promote it on my LinkedIn. That means people will actually sign up and I don't have to pound my head against the wall to try to figure out how are we going to get more registrations to this webinar, which channel we're going to put ad budget behind. I can literally just now that I built a following on LinkedIn, promote the webinar on LinkedIn and people will sign up. That means that when you have company news, maybe from an executive standpoint or for your company page or founders, right? When you have company news and you want to post that on LinkedIn, people actually will click through and read it and see that, versus just taking two grand and putting the press release on the wire. And Lord knows whatever happens when you do that. It also means when you have that big event in San Francisco next quarter, you can post about it on LinkedIn. And that's actually gonna help you move tickets. Instead of doing what we've all had to do before, which is beg and plead with the sales and CS teams and other people within the company to help promote the event to their customers and their audience. And just to make it even simpler, let's. Let's put it like this.

There's two people.

There's person A and person B. Both of them wanna launch a new podcast. Person A has 10,000 followers on LinkedIn. Person B has seven followers on LinkedIn. If that person were to launch new podcasts and promote it, who do you think is going to get more initial listeners to their podcast? It's obviously going to be person A. And this is why, I don't understand, why do we think that LinkedIn followers are a vanity metric? They're not. I see social media followers in the same way that I think about building an email list. It's different in that you're renting the audience, right? Like, that's why email is so important to transfer that audience and own it. But the goal, I think, is to leverage the attention that you get on LinkedIn. And so you're making a bet. You're saying, I think that it all starts with understanding your customers, right? I think that my customers are on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has, however, many hundreds of millions of users that are in my industry.

They definitely do.

My goal is to then transfer, like use the attention on LinkedIn and transfer that audience from LinkedIn to places that you own, which could be your website, your email list, podcast, whatever. And so in my example, I've been able to grow my account to 150,000 followers on LinkedIn. That's way more people than I have on my email list. But I'm continuing to grow my social media following. And my social media following is the thing that's feeding my email list and feeding my podcast and feeding events and webinars and things that we do. And it's not vanity metrics. Also to me, because I've seen this time and time again from a revenue standpoint. I've seen it when I was at drift, my LinkedIn helped the company drive business. I've saw it firsthand, drive sales, drive demos when I was at Privy. Same thing my LinkedIn helped drive business When I wrote my book last year, founder, brand, LinkedIn. Posting about it on LinkedIn drove a.

Majority of those initial book sales.

When I do a webinar, whether that's with a sponsor or one of my own, we can drive hundreds of signups just from LinkedIn. Organic posting. It costs nothing. Boom. Post it. Hundreds of signups. I got the first a thousand members of DGMG, which is now called Exit 5, almost exclusively through LinkedIn. That was $10,000 a month in recurring revenue exclusively posting through LinkedIn. So I don't understand how it's a vanity metric. I'm posting about things on LinkedIn. They're driving real business results. And as another example, Whenever I promote Exit 5, and I've been playing more offense with Exit 5 recently, when I promote Exit 5 on LinkedIn, I always get new email subscribers and new paying members. And so when I do it, I got to remind myself, hey, at least once or twice a week, not all the time, you can't be doing it out of 10 posts. If I posted about Exit 510 times in a row, it's going to be noise.

It's.

People are going to tune out. But if 8 of the 10 posts I add value, say something entertaining, funny, educational, whatever, then those two times I use it to promote, that's when you're actually gonna see real results. And so, like, I'm recording this on Friday, January 20th, and through 19 days so far in January, I know for a fact that through LinkedIn, through my LinkedIn alone, we've driven almost 5k in new MRR through LinkedIn. So I just wanted to put this down because followers are not a vanity metric. I think that you should be. It's wise to be using LinkedIn to build a following for yourself, for your business, and then use it to drive actual results for your business. I initially wrote about this on LinkedIn and someone wrote, yeah, but you have to have relevant followers. And that's my favorite part about sometimes pushing on social media is, well, yes, thank you, I appreciate that clarification. Yes, you do need to have relevant followers because that is where followers do become a vanity metric.

Right?

If you're trying to sell stakes and you build an audience full of vegans, then you're not going to be able to sell steaks to that audience. And so in that sense, followers doesn't matter. If you have a million followers, you're not going to be able to sell that product. So it does come down to building a relevant audience. And you do that through content.

Right?

It's the thing. I don't purposely target specific people with my content, but I mostly write about B2B marketing, B2B SaaS, and now my business of being a solopreneur that is going to attract an audience of people who are interested in those things. And that's how you target with organic content. There's no way to target your posts when you're posting organically on LinkedIn, but you do it through what you're talking about. Right? If I started posting about CrossFit every day, over time, I would build an audience of people on LinkedIn who are also interested in CrossFit. But that's not the audience that I want and so I don't post about those things. So that's how you get relevant followers. So share this episode with your company, share this episode with your team, maybe send it to the skeptical CFO. This is why you build an audience on LinkedIn. Now, the catch is you can't just do this for a week and have 107 followers on LinkedIn and expect magic to happen. But this is why you commit to doing it for long term. And so month one, month two, month three, now you're six, seven, eight, nine months down the road and you're starting to build a real audience. And any of these things Take time. I post about this week where I recommitted to this podcast, the Exit 5 podcast, back in April, April of 2022. I said I'm going to post, I'm going to do an Exit 5 podcast every single week. And it's just now, in January, eight months later, that I'm starting to see the benefits of that. Where the podcast is starting to grow. I'm starting to get much more interest and comments and reach from it. And it's taken eight months of consistency to get here and now I will start to reap the benefits. Same with LinkedIn. I now have however many thousand followers, it didn't happen overnight. I've been posting there for five, six years. So if you want to build this channel, you got to carve out some time and commit to it. And I like to actually focus on the goal of output in the beginning. So this is not. People see this as say, they say post every day. I don't care if you post every day or three times a week. It just has to be some amount of consistent posting so that after a month, after six months, after 12 months, you can actually start to get enough volume to understand what's working, what's not, what people are interested in and what's not. And you can eventually build a following on LinkedIn. LinkedIn followers, not vanity metrics. Exit 5 hey, thanks for listening to.

This episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates.

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