How to get free LinkedIn followers: four ways, and how the algorithm reacts to each

The four ways, side by side

Every follower you will ever get comes from one of four places. Read to the end: the most interesting way is the fourth, because it is the most controversial. Officially LinkedIn is against pods and most articles call them dead; in practice, everything LinkedIn describes going after is automation, and a pod of the right people is, apart from content, the only thing we have seen reliably lift reach. Content is the most effective way and the hardest: finding your own topic and format is not a five-minute job, it often takes years. A pod is the best balance of effort and result.

Way 1: Make content your audience actually wants

A follower on LinkedIn is someone who wants your next post. Most of them never meet you: they see one of your posts because someone in their network reacted to it, read it to the end, open your profile and press Follow. Everything in this way is about making that chain happen more often.

How to grow followers with content, step by step

1. Pick the one thing you want to be followed for. Not "marketing", but "pricing for B2B SaaS" or "hiring your first 10 engineers". Put it in your headline, because the headline travels with every comment and post you write.
2. Make Follow the main button on your profile. Visitors who land from a post should see Follow, not Connect. The setting is described in our LinkedIn follow-for-follow guide.
3. Collect 20 post ideas before you start. Use the questions clients, colleagues and recruiters actually ask you. A list removes the "what do I post today" problem, which is what usually breaks the rhythm.
4. Write the first two lines last. The feed cuts the text after the first lines with a "see more" link. Those lines decide whether anyone reads the rest, so state the result or the tension there, not the background.
5. Pick one format per idea. A how-to with steps works as a document (PDF carousel), a story works as plain text, a before/after works as an image. Do not force every idea into the same shape.
6. Post on a rhythm you can keep for three months. Two or three posts a week, at a time your audience is at work. Consistency matters more than volume, because each post trains the feed on who reacts to you.
7. Stay for the first hour. Answer every comment with a real reply that adds something. A conversation under the post is worth more than any number of likes.
8. Comment on bigger accounts in your niche between posts. A sharp comment under a post with a large audience puts your name and headline in front of people who do not know you yet.
9. Check which posts brought followers. LinkedIn post analytics now show profile views and followers gained per post. Make more of the posts that converted, not of the ones that only got likes.

How the algorithm reacts to your content

LinkedIn does not publish its ranking weights, so this is what people who measure hundreds of thousands of posts actually see. Where a point is practitioner experience rather than a measured number, it says so.

• Every post starts small. The feed shows a new post to part of your own network first and widens it only if those readers engage (Metricool, Hootsuite). LinkedIn's engineers describe predicting a post's reach from how fast likes, comments and shares arrive (LinkedIn Engineering, 2017). How big that first slice is has never been published; the "test, then expand" pattern is observed practice.
• Time spent beats the like button. The feed counts posts people scroll past quickly as "skips" and ranks them lower (LinkedIn Engineering, 2020). The 2026 feed model predicts clicks, skips and long reads alongside likes and comments (LinkedIn Engineering, 2026). In practice, a first line that earns the "see more" click and a body people read to the end is what moves a post.
• Comments outweigh likes, and saves are underrated. Practitioners agree on the direction, not on the size. Richard van der Blom's 2024 Algorithm InSights (1.5M posts) put a comment at 15 likes and a save at 8 (Social Media Today). AuthoredUp's study of 621,833 posts found a comment worth about 2 likes and a save about 5 (AuthoredUp).
• Saves are the closest thing to a follow signal. In the same AuthoredUp data, a reader who saves a post has a 130% higher chance of following the author (AuthoredUp).
• Links in the post usually cost reach. Van der Blom measured posts with an external link at 0.61 of median reach on personal profiles in 2024 (Social Media Today); his 2026 report puts one link in the body at minus 18.8% (relay). Ordinal's own data says the penalty mostly hits company pages and personal profiles show almost none (Ordinal). The sources disagree, so if a link matters, test it on your own account.
• A post lives for two days, not one hour. Across 673,658 posts, half of the impressions arrived within 48 hours, and about 40% of interactions on personal profiles came on day one (Metricool).
• Followers got harder to earn by posting alone. Van der Blom's 2025 data shows views down about 50% and follower growth down 59% (WrittenlyHub); his October 2025 update shows follower growth down 42% since February 2025 (Right Angle). That is why way 2 matters more than it used to.

Content best practices

• Post two or three times a week. Van der Blom's data has two to three posts a week as the sweet spot and more than one a day as a loss (Right Angle, Social Media Today); Buffer's data on 2M+ posts found two to five a week improves impressions (Buffer).
• Reply to every comment, early. Buffer measured a 30% engagement lift from replying (Buffer), and van der Blom's advice is to answer within the first hour (Social Media Today).
• Make posts people want to keep: checklists, templates, frameworks, before/after numbers. Saves lead to follows.
• Use documents for how-tos. In Socialinsider's 2026 benchmark of 2.45M company page posts, native documents averaged 7.00% engagement against 3.25% for link posts (Socialinsider).
• Comment on other people's posts every week. LinkedIn's own creator account said commenting once a week can triple profile views (Lindsey Gamble), and van der Blom's 2025 data links a comment you leave to 80% more visibility for your own next post (relay).
• Turn a strong series into a newsletter. When the first edition goes out, your connections and followers are invited to subscribe (LinkedIn Help).

What to avoid in your posts

• Editing the post in the first minutes. Van der Blom's 2024 data puts the cost of an edit at about 15% of reach (Social Media Today). Proofread before you press Post.
• Posting more than once a day. The second post competes with the first for the same readers.
• "Like if you agree" and other asks for reactions. LinkedIn said in 2022 that it stops promoting posts made only to collect engagement (Social Media Today).
• A link in the body of a post whose only job is to win followers. Put it in a comment or leave it out.
• Judging a post after an hour. Half of the impressions come within 48 hours (Metricool), so wait two days before you decide it flopped.

Typical content mistakes

• Writing about everything. The feed ranks on what each reader has interacted with before (LinkedIn Engineering, 2026); people who followed you for one topic scroll past the others, and quick scroll-pasts count against a post. This is our reading of how the model works, not a published rule.
• Optimising for likes. A like is the cheapest signal there is; comments and saves are what move a post and what turn readers into followers.
• Posting and leaving. The first replies under a post are yours to start.
• Measuring impressions instead of followers per post. LinkedIn now shows followers gained for each post; that is the number to grow.
• Stopping after three weeks. Most people quit before they have enough posts to see which topic their audience follows them for.

Way 2: Ask your circle to follow and engage

Your circle is everyone who already knows you: colleagues and former colleagues, clients, classmates, friends in the industry, people you met at events. They are the quickest followers you will ever get, and more importantly they are the first readers of every post you publish. That second part is what most people miss.

How to ask your circle, step by step

1. Write the list. Go through your phone contacts, email, past employers and clients. Mark the people who would genuinely care about the topic you want to be followed for.
2. Connect with a one-line note. On LinkedIn every accepted connection also follows you, so each yes adds a follower who knows your name.
3. Ask the rest to follow, personally. For people who will not connect, send a short message: what you are going to post about and why it is useful to them. A personal ask works; a mass message does not.
4. Put the profile where people already meet you. Email signature, company website, slide decks, newsletter footer, a QR code on your event badge.
5. Build a small first-hour group. Five to fifteen people who are interested in your topic and agree to be told when a post goes live. Ask them for a real comment with an opinion or a question, not a like.
6. Rotate by topic. Tag the group differently for different subjects, so the people who comment are the people who would care anyway.
7. Return it. Comment on their posts in their first hour. A circle that only gives one way stops answering after a month.

The golden hour: why agency posts keep showing up in your feed

Every agency knows this scene. The agency writes a post for a client, say the founder of a B2B company. It goes live at 9:00. At 9:01 a message goes out in the agency's team chat, the client's company chat and a couple of partner groups: "The post is live, please add your take." By 10:00 the post has thirty comments from real people with real networks: the client's sales team, the agency's strategists, two partners, a former colleague.

That is exactly what the feed is built to reward. LinkedIn's engineers wrote that the first few pieces of feedback on a post are the most important (LinkedIn Engineering, 2018), that reach is predicted from how fast likes, comments and shares arrive (LinkedIn Engineering, 2017), and that the members who first interact with a post are an early signal of whether it will go viral (LinkedIn Engineering, 2023). Thirty early comments from people with their own networks tick every box, so the post is carried into the networks of everyone who commented. That is why it lands in your feed with "Anna commented on this" on top, even though you have never followed the founder, and why you see the same names under it.

The same logic is behind employee advocacy. LinkedIn's own guide says employees' networks are together about 10 times larger than the company's follower base, and that what employees share gets about twice the click-through rate (LinkedIn). Company pages even have a "Notify employees" button for posts that matter (LinkedIn Help).

Practitioners call this window the golden hour. Van der Blom's 2024 report says to answer comments within the first hour and that initial engagement shapes how a post is treated (Social Media Today); others talk about the first 90 minutes (Mercer MacKay). LinkedIn has never published a time window, so treat "one hour" as observed practice, not a documented rule.

How the algorithm reacts to your circle

• Each accepted connection is a follower. Connecting automatically makes both people follow each other (LinkedIn Help), so the circle is also the first audience every post is shown to.
• Early, real conversation is the strongest push you can get. See the golden hour above: first feedback counts most, and comments from people with their own networks carry the post into those networks, which is where new followers come from.
• Identical engagement from the same group gets discounted. LinkedIn says it wants to make engagement pods "entirely ineffective" (Social Media Today) and limits feed reach for posts it reads as artificially promoted (LinkedIn News, 2026); excessive or automated comments get their own visibility limited (LinkedIn Help). Van der Blom describes posts that collect 20 to 30 comments in the first five minutes, most of them AI-written (Creator Science). That pattern is what the feed now discounts. People from your topic writing what they actually think, when they actually read the post, is not.
• Helping your circle helps you. Van der Blom's 2025 data links each comment you leave to 80% more visibility for your own next post (relay), so commenting on your circle's posts in their first hour pays back twice.

Best practices for your circle

• Ask for a comment with an opinion, an example or a question. Never ask for a like.
• Let people comment when they actually read the post, across the first hour or two, not all in the first minute.
• Pick people from your topic. Their networks are the audience you want followers from.
• Reply to every comment and keep the thread going; replies are measured to lift engagement by about 30% (Buffer).
• For a company: use "Notify employees" on the posts that matter; an admin can send it once per day (LinkedIn Help).
• Give back: show up in your circle's first hour as often as they show up in yours.

What to avoid with your circle

• Copy-paste or AI-written comments, and "Great post!". They add nothing to the thread and are the first thing to be discounted.
• The same ten people under every post, forever, at the same minute. That is the pod pattern LinkedIn says it limits.
• Engagement automation of any kind. The point of this way is that the people are real and the comments are theirs.
• Tagging a dozen people who are not part of the story just to notify them. It annoys the circle you need.
• Mass DMs with "please like my post". A personal ask to a few people works; a broadcast burns goodwill.

Typical circle mistakes

• Asking the circle to follow but giving them nothing to read. Followers who never see a useful post stop opening your posts.
• A circle that is outside your topic. Friends from another industry can start the first hour, but the post then spreads into networks that will not follow you for this topic.
• Using the circle only for launches. The feed learns who reacts to you from every post, not from the big ones.
• Everyone in the first two minutes, then silence. A real conversation keeps going for the first hour or two.
• Forgetting to answer. Thirty comments with no reply from the author look like a pod, not a discussion.

Way 3: Buy followers (the weakest option)

This is the fastest way to change the number on your profile and the slowest way to change anything else. It is here because people ask about it, not because we recommend it.

How buying followers is usually done

1. Find a seller and paste your profile URL. Packages are sold by quantity.
2. Pay and wait. Accounts start following over hours or days.
3. Look at the number. It is bigger. Now look at your next post: the reach is the same or lower, because none of these accounts read anything.

How the algorithm reacts to bought followers

• A follower helps only if they react. New posts are shown to part of your network first and widened when those readers engage (Metricool); the algorithm does not show your posts to all your followers (Hootsuite). Accounts that never read or react add nothing to that first audience.
• Engagement rate drops as dead weight grows. Across 372,812 posts, median engagement was 2.56% for accounts with up to 1,000 followers and 1.53% above 100,000. AuthoredUp's summary: 500 engaged connections outperform 10,000 dormant ones (AuthoredUp). Bought followers are dormant by definition.
• The number does not stay. LinkedIn reports that from July to December 2025 it restricted 24.4 million fake accounts proactively and caught 99.7% of fake accounts before any member reported them (LinkedIn Community Report). When an account goes, its follow goes with it.
• Nothing in the ranking reads the count. Everything LinkedIn's engineers describe (velocity, first feedback, time spent, skips) is about what readers do with a post (LinkedIn Engineering, 2020, LinkedIn Engineering, 2026), not about how many followers the author has.

Best practices if you want to spend money anyway

• If you want to spend money on reach, pay LinkedIn instead: members can boost a post that already works organically, and real people in the roles you pick see it and decide whether to follow (LinkedIn Help). Companies can sponsor employees' posts as Thought Leader Ads (LinkedIn).
• Pay for craft: an editor for your hooks or a designer for document posts improves every post you publish afterwards.
• Pay for rooms: events and meetups grow the circle you use in way 2.

What to avoid if you have bought followers

• Buying to look established before a launch. Visitors compare the follower count to the reactions under your posts: 10,000 followers and three likes reads worse than 800 followers and forty comments.
• Judging your content by engagement rate after buying. The denominator is now inflated, so every post looks weaker than it is.
• Buying engagement on posts as well. It is the same dead weight, moved to the place the feed actually measures.

Typical mistakes with bought followers

• Thinking social proof turns into reach. It does not: the feed ranks what readers do, not what the profile says.
• Treating the count as the goal. The goal is people who read, comment and save; the count follows them.
• Expecting it to be a shortcut to ways 1 and 2. It is a detour: after buying you still need the content and the circle, and now your numbers are harder to read.

Way 4: Run a pod the right way (the controversial one)

Almost every article on pods says the same thing: pods are dead, LinkedIn catches them, and engagement from the wrong people teaches the feed to show your posts to the wrong audience (ContentIn). The last part is true, and it is exactly why the usual pod fails. A pod is simply a group of people who act on each other's posts in the first hour. Fill it with the right people and it does what your circle does in way 2, on every post, with a bigger group than your own circle. After content, it is the one way we have seen move follower numbers reliably, and it takes weeks to set up, not years.

How to run a pod for followers, step by step

1. Decide whose followers you want. Write down the roles and industries you want reading you. Pod members should be those people, or people whose own audience is made of them.
2. Build the pod from three sources. Colleagues and peers in your field first, then a niche group, then a service to fill the gaps. The table below lists where to find each.
3. Publish, then tell the pod within minutes. One message with the link. No script, no "please like".
4. Collect as many real actions as you can in the first hour. People read to the end, react, and the ones with something to say comment in their own words. The more of this happens in the first hour, the further the post travels.
5. Answer every comment while the hour is still running. Each reply is another action under the post and keeps the thread moving.
6. Make the profile ready for strangers. Followers come from people outside the pod who see the post through a member's activity and open your profile. Follow button first, a headline that says what you post about.
7. Compare followers per post with and without the pod. Post analytics show followers gained per post. If the pod posts do not convert, the pod is the wrong audience.

Where to find the right pod for followers: people, groups and services

Start with people, add groups, fill gaps with a service. The closer a member's own audience is to the one you want, the more followers each post brings.

How the algorithm reacts to a pod built for followers

• The official line. LinkedIn says its goal is to make engagement pods "entirely ineffective" and that it limits the reach of content it flags as artificially boosted (Social Media Today, Nov 2025).

• What LinkedIn actually describes catching. Third-party tools such as browser extensions that comment on many posts at once (Social Media Today, Nov 2025), comments posted by auto-scripts without human review (Social Media Today, Feb 2026) and suspicious engagement patterns (LinkedIn News, 2026). LinkedIn has also said pods are difficult to combat because they are organized outside the app (Social Media Today, Feb 2026).

• Our reading. Real people from your field who read the post and respond in their own words in the first hour are, from the feed's side, early feedback from relevant members, which is what the feed was built to reward (LinkedIn Engineering, 2018, 2017). We see nothing in that to tell it apart from a post that simply landed with the right people.

• Followers come from the members' networks. Reactions and comments can show up in the reactor's network feed (Fortune). That is where the strangers who follow you see the post, so a pod is only as good as its members' networks.

• The wrong pod costs you. A pod from every industry shows your post to people who will never follow, and teaches the feed the wrong audience (ContentIn).

Best practices for a follower pod

• Members from your field or your target audience, nobody else.
• Rotate: for each post, the members closest to its topic.
• Real comments in the members' own words, of different lengths, some with questions.
• Actions spread over the first hour, not all in the first minute.
• Give back: act on members' posts with the same care.

What to avoid in a follower pod

• Tools that like and comment from your account automatically. That is what LinkedIn says it targets, and it can restrict accounts that keep doing it (Social Media Today, Feb 2026).
• Giant pods of hundreds of people from every industry.
• "Great post!" comments: they add nothing for the reader and nothing for the feed.
• Follow-for-follow inside the pod in place of engagement: members are not your readers.

Typical follower pod mistakes

• Joining the first pod you find and blaming LinkedIn when nobody follows.
• Using the pod for likes only.
• Stopping the content work because the pod "does the reach".
• Never checking which pod posts actually brought followers.

Your first-hour checklist

Tick it off the next time you post. It combines way 1 and way 2, which is where most follower growth comes from.

Circle too small to start with?

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Where the algorithm notes come from

Algorithm notes on this page come from three kinds of sources, labelled so you can weigh them.

Measured by practitioners (datasets of posts):

• Richard van der Blom, Algorithm InSights 2024, 1.5M posts: Social Media Today
• Van der Blom, 2025 report and October 2025 update: WrittenlyHub, Right Angle, The LinkedIn Secrets
• Van der Blom, 2026 report (link penalty): Melanie Goodman
• AuthoredUp, 621,833 posts: AuthoredUp algorithm study; 372,812 posts: AuthoredUp metrics study
• Buffer, 2M+ posts: Buffer
• Metricool, 673,658 posts: Metricool
• Socialinsider, 2.45M company page posts: Socialinsider
• Ordinal, link penalty data: Ordinal

Observed by practitioners (experience, not a dataset):

• First-hour and first-90-minutes practice: Social Media Today, Mercer MacKay
• AI comments in the first minutes: Creator Science podcast with Richard van der Blom
• Test-then-expand distribution: Metricool, Hootsuite

Published by LinkedIn and its engineers (mechanism):

• Feed relevance and velocity: 2017; first feedback: 2018; dwell time and skips: 2020; early interactors: 2023; the 2026 feed: 2026
• Pods and artificial engagement: Social Media Today, LinkedIn News
• Employee advocacy: LinkedIn Marketing Blog
• Fake accounts: LinkedIn Community Report

On pods:

• LinkedIn's stated position on pods: Social Media Today, Nov 2025, LinkedIn News, Mar 2026
• What LinkedIn describes detecting: Social Media Today, Feb 2026
• The usual "pods are dead" argument: ContentIn
• Pod groups and services: Telegram pod, Skool community, Reddit, Podawaa, Linkboost, Lempod

LinkedIn does not publish ranking weights or time windows. Where practitioners disagree (the weight of a comment, the cost of a link), both numbers are shown.

Frequently asked questions

Do LinkedIn engagement pods work for getting followers?

Yes, it works, but it has to be done right. Only upvote.club does it right — nobody else on the market has this technology.

What do LinkedIn followers give me?

It grows the account, but you need the right tool.

Why do I keep seeing posts from people I don't follow?

Because someone you are connected to commented on them, usually early. Comments carry a post into the commenter's network, and a post that gets real comments in its first hour is shown to more people. Agencies use this on purpose: they ask everyone they can reach to comment right after a client post goes live.

How often should I post to grow LinkedIn followers?

Two to three times a week. Van der Blom's data has that as the sweet spot and more than one post a day as a loss; Buffer's data found two to five a week improves impressions.

Should I put links in my LinkedIn posts?

Not in a post whose job is to win followers. Practitioner data mostly shows lower reach for posts with an external link, though one study finds the effect small on personal profiles. If you need the link, put it in a comment or test both versions.

Is it harder to get LinkedIn followers than it used to be?

Yes. Van der Blom's 2025 data shows follower growth down 59%, and his October 2025 update shows it down 42% since February 2025. Posting alone brings fewer followers than before, so the first-hour push from your circle matters more.

Read next

• Get real LinkedIn followers
• Free LinkedIn followers course
• LinkedIn follow for follow
• LinkedIn engagement pods
• Free LinkedIn tools
• How to get free LinkedIn comments
• How to get free LinkedIn connections
• How to get free LinkedIn saves