Getting followers on LinkedIn is a two-stage motion, and most people only run one of them. Posting builds the stage you own; commenting on larger accounts borrows a stage bigger than yours and puts you in front of people who would never see your posts. Early on — under a few thousand followers — commenting produces more new followers per hour than posting does, because your own reach is capped by an audience you do not yet have. Run both, and make your posting predictable enough that people start expecting you.
I built a strategic commenting tool before I built Liftli. Founders would sign up, use it, and then stop — and when I asked why, the same two answers came back every time.
One: no time. Commenting, chasing replies, keeping up with the threads. It's real work and it never ends.
Two, and this is the interesting one: they wanted to own the main stage. The author of a post is the main act. The commenter is in the audience. They didn't want to spend their limited hours in someone else's comment section.
I get it. But here's the problem with that instinct.
If you have 1,000 or 2,000 followers, you don't have a stage yet. You have a room. Owning a room is not the same as owning a stage, and you cannot grow the room by performing in it more often — the ceiling is the audience you already have.
The two-stage motion
| Posting | Commenting | |
|---|---|---|
| Whose audience | Yours | Someone else's, usually much larger |
| What it builds | Depth — the reason people follow you | Reach — the reason people find you |
| Ceiling | Your current follower count | The other account's audience |
| Best when | You have something only you can say | You are small and need discovery |
| Follower yield early on | Low | High |
The answer is not to pick one. It's to run the combination: own your stage, however small, and comment your way onto bigger ones to make it larger. That joint motion creates real traction on a profile. Either one alone stalls — posting alone because nobody new sees it, commenting alone because there is nowhere for the interested people to land.
Why commenting converts so well
A good comment is a free sample of your thinking, placed in a room already full of the people you want.
When someone reads a comment that reframes the post they were reading, the next click is your profile. That is a far warmer path to a follow than someone stumbling onto a post from a stranger, because they have already seen you be useful once.
There is a sales version of this too. I once suggested to an SDR team that they comment on prospects' posts before reaching out. The pushback was immediate: "We're measured on outbound, not inbound." Two weeks later one of them tried it anyway. His response rate roughly doubled — because the cold email was no longer cold. The prospect had already seen his name saying something intelligent.
Comments do double duty: they grow the follower count and they warm the pipeline.
The ritual effect
There's a founder I think about constantly. He posts once a week. A single contrarian take. And people wait for it — it became the LinkedIn equivalent of Friday coffee with the gang, a standing weekly parliament where his audience shows up to argue.
Here is the part that breaks people's brains: I'm not actually sure what his domain expertise is.
It didn't matter. The ritual made him the thought leader. The mechanism wasn't the credential — it was that he reliably hosts the conversation. So when anyone in that orbit thinks about an investment or a partner in that space, his name fires first.
The lesson for follower growth: people follow predictability as much as they follow quality. An account that shows up on a rhythm gives readers a reason to subscribe. An account that appears at random gives them a reason to like the post and move on.
One caveat, as an operator: once a week is too little while you are still figuring out what works. He found his groove and coasted. You cannot learn what resonates from 52 data points a year. Post more during the experimentation phase, then settle into the ritual once you know what it is.
What actually converts a reader into a follower
A follow is a commitment to hear from you again. People make it for a narrow set of reasons:
- You said something they disagreed with, well. The algorithm rewards the argument, not the applause — and so do humans. Contrarian, defensible takes convert; balanced summaries do not.
- You were specific about something they're living through. Unique experience beats general advice. Anyone can write "focus on your ICP." Only you can write what happened when you didn't.
- You showed up more than once. Most follows come from the second or third encounter, not the first. This is why the commenting motion matters — it manufactures encounters.
- Your profile confirmed the promise. The post earns the click; the profile earns the follow. If your headline is a job title and your About section is a resume, you lose people who were already sold.
The plan, if you want a concrete one
- Pick 15–25 accounts whose audience is your audience and who post consistently. Not the biggest — the most relevant.
- Comment substantively on 3–5 posts a day. Substantive means adding a distinct point, a counterexample or a number. "Great post!" is worse than nothing; it puts your name on something forgettable.
- Post on a fixed rhythm you can hold, higher while you're experimenting.
- Reply to every comment on your own posts, fast. Each reply is another engagement event and pulls the commenter back.
- Fix the profile before you scale the traffic. Headline as a point of view, About as an argument.
- Measure followers gained per week, not likes per post. Likes tell you your existing network approves. Followers tell you strangers arrived.
Give it ninety days. The first thirty will feel like nothing is happening, because the encounters are accumulating before any of them convert.