Increasing Follower Counts


If you're interested in growing your follower count, there are 2 things that have ever contributed to a spike in mine:

  1. Other people mentioning my name in their posts
  2. Interactions I've had while commenting on other people's posts

The common thread here is that (at least for me) it's not about pushing out content. Content-Creation is a one-way megaphone and has trivial impact on follower count (again, at least for me.) Most of my time on LinkedIn is spent in messages, and then commenting/discussing on people's comments.

Much of the content I do create is adapted from a conversation/interaction I've had. Maybe I'm doing it wrong - maybe the megaphone works better for others, but I never intentionally set out to become a "content creator" and get a bunch of followers. It... just... happened...

In short, the best advice I can give is to focus less on the followers, focus less on content, focus more on interactions, and genuinely connecting with people, be #opentohelping, be a resource.

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FAQs for a Software Engineering Hiring Manager

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Work Experience vs Professional Experience

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In reviewing a bunch of resumes this week, I noticed quite a lot of resumes with a  "Work Experience"  section. In each of those resumes, people had de-valuing some very valuable  experience - and I write that with no exaggeration. The problem is people were looking at their experience purely through the "Job Title/Relevancy" lens and had reduced their experience down to a list of discrete, random, disconnected jobs. No interconnectedness, no narrative thread weaving through it all. As much as you may feel some jobs have no way of being connected, the reality is  you   are always the connection . To not connect them on your resume is to lose all that growth, knowledge, skills, impact, value, and trajectory. In other words - you lose the " You " in the resume. I recommended they start with a small change. Reword "Work Experience" to "Professional Experience" because, ultimately, every single job they had was in service of building their
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