On most social media there is the concept of being followed, where someone chooses to hear from you or see your content regularly, and LinkedIn is no different.

Some users will even select “Follow” as their primary option or choose to use LinkedIn in Creator mode as they want to use LinkedIn to build an even bigger following , but LinkedIn is getting divergent.

You can use it to build an audience or alternatively you can use LinkedIn as a social network (as it was intended originally) which makes it much easier to operate and consistently get results / more clients etcetera – this old blog about social media versus social network might be an interesting read.

But are more followers always a good thing?

It can be good if they are interested in what you have to say, your content etc, but if you want a relationship with those people it might be even better if you were connected to them.

However, if you don’t want people to see what you are posting, for example competitors, ex partners etc, then you do not want those people following you. The good news is that LinkedIn has you covered as you can stop people looking at you or following you by blocking them, but it can be tricky to work out who has actually followed you – so we want to tell you how.

Here are some simple steps to see who is following you:

1. Go to your own profile on the laptop or desktop
2. Scroll down until you see your “Activity” section and select followers in the top left corner in blue under the heading, as highlighted below.

3. You will now see who is either following you and vice versa, LinkedIn shows “Following”
4. You might see someone that says “+Follow” which indicates they are following you, but you are not following them.
5. You can then choose to either:
   1. Follow them back if they’re interesting
   2. Send them a connection if you know them.
   3. If you don’t want them seeing what you are up to within LinkedIn then you can block them. Here’s a link to a blog about that.

Perhaps next time you see a notification of being followed you might want to look at who it is, and think why before just thinking “good”.

Not all followers are good and if you want you can also chose to turn off the ability of people to follow you on LinkedIn, but that’s for our next blog – so watch this space.

8 November 2022

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