By Steve Moran

I just checked. I have 31,475 followers on LinkedIn. I bet you don’t have that many.

Confession: I actually feel completely smarmy telling you that.

Honestly, it means nothing, except maybe a lot of wasted time on LinkedIn. If your goal is to grow your LinkedIn follower numbers, anyone can do it. It’s not an overnight thing. I have been on LinkedIn since its early days — at least 20 years back, when having 1,000 connections was a big deal, and no one could quite figure out what to do with it.

One more thing you should know about my LinkedIn stats: there are plenty of people out there in the senior living ecosystem who rack up way more impressions per year than I do.

What It All Means

I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t pay attention to your LinkedIn analytics. You absolutely should. But followers and impressions can easily become vanity metrics that feed one’s ego and nothing else. I have a number of friends who are trying to sell services, good services, valuable services, who have had posts go viral, only to be disappointed that it brought them zero business.

What Counts

There are really only two things that count on LinkedIn:

  1. It Grows Your Business. This means different things for different people and organizations. In some cases, the posts become “top of the funnel” that trigger a sales sequence that leads to business. 
  2. It Makes the World a Better Place. This is perhaps more subjective, and some might even call it judgmental, something I am glad to own. Here is what I mean. Does your post help leaders lead better? Does your post help people think about things differently? Does it inspire them to live a better, happier life? These are the things that count.

The Highest Value

As I have been working on this article, I have come to believe the highest value LinkedIn offers is actually the simplest: making new connections and deepening existing ones.

In person, human-to-human, will always be the richest form of relationship building. That’s followed by phone calls and video calls. But sometimes, because of distance, time, and energy, LinkedIn becomes the thing that keeps us connected until we are in the same place at the same time. And when that moment comes, those conversations are richer because of it.

We have AI, and we have social media. Both have made our lives better, maybe. If I’m honest, I’m not 100% sure I believe that, even though I use both constantly.

What I do believe is this: the platform is only as valuable as what you bring to it. Followers and impressions won’t tell you that. But the person who reaches out because something you wrote mattered to them, that says it all. 

When the Numbers Count

When I sold Senior Living Foresight to ProcareHR, that follower number had a real dollar value attached to it. Reach matters when you’re building something. Influence is an asset when it’s time to put a price on what you’ve built.

So I’m not here to pretend numbers don’t matter. Sometimes they genuinely do.

But the question that actually matters is this: did your post make anything better for anyone?

The Closed Loop Problem

You can feel it when you scroll …

Trite memes dressed up as wisdom. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Teamwork makes the dream work. If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. Fail fast, learn faster. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Maybe. Maybe not. But they got likes, so here we are.

Poor me posts about how overworked and misunderstood they — fill in the position … executive directors, marketing directors, life enrichment directors, regional leaders — are, with no path forward and no solution offered.

Photos that are really just “look how cool I am” with a caption stapled on.

Trivia posts. How much meat should be in a taco? How many things on this list have you done? Designed entirely to generate engagement, carrying zero actual value.

Complaints about AI. Every. Single. Day.

None of this makes anyone’s life better. None of it grows anyone’s business. It just recirculates, performing influence for an audience that is performing right back.

What Actually Builds a Following

I’ve been writing for senior living leaders for a long time. The following I have didn’t come from posting my metrics. It came from saying things people recognized as true and valuable, even when those things were uncomfortable.

That’s a slower build. It doesn’t generate the same short-term spike. But the people who follow you because you said something that mattered are a completely different audience from the people who followed you because your number looked impressive.

One of those audiences will still be there in five years.

The Only Number Worth Posting

LinkedIn is an amazing platform that gives you the opportunity to improve the lives of your audience and, by extension, your audience’s audience.

When you post things that bring real value to people, you make the world just a little bit better. That makes your life better and your organization better.

And ultimately, it will make you more money, since we are all selling something.