Celebrating 100,000 LinkedIn Followers 🎉

Thank you to each and every UX friend who is following me on LinkedIn. I recently passed 100,000 LinkedIn followers, which brings me into the medium league on this site. The big influencers have followers in the millions.

What’s more impressive than the absolute number is that I only started posting to LinkedIn in May 2023. I am amazed that anybody followed me before then when all I posted was an intermittent job opening every two years. However, after abandoning administrative duties, I got my old creativity back and have started posting original content.

My follower count is currently growing at an annualized rate of 155%. This growth rate may be hard to sustain as the absolute number of followers grows, but it might be possible to double in a year.

Celebrating 100,000 LinkedIn followers. (Illustration by Dall-E.)

There isn’t a “secret formula” to my growth. My mantra has always been simple: share content that’s original, insightful, and consistent. Note those three keywords: original, insightful, and regular posting. I see too much content on LinkedIn that’s regurgitated or lacking insight. And, of course, if you only post intermittently, don’t expect sustained follower growth. Regular postings are why I gained more followers in the last half year than throughout the previous 20 years.

In fact, I have violated most of the advice for LinkedIn growth hacking. I post long and detailed articles, which don’t do well on social media. But going deep is what I like. I prefer linear content over carousels with poor usability, even though the latter forces users to “engage” more to see content, which the algorithm likes. I also refuse to play tricks like “link in comment,” which supposedly makes you a darling of the LinkedIn algorithm. I am a usability guy, and the only usable place to link to the full article is within the post that announces that article. If you post the link in the comments, it risks being flooded by real comments. And in any case, it’s positively user-hostile to make users go hunt for where to click when they want more info.

I refuse to impose the extra interaction cost on my readers that LinkedIn’s algorithm supposedly prefers, with tricks like “link in comment” and carousels. This costs me views but preserves my pride as a usability guy. (Maze by Dall-E.)

Once again, thank you for being part of my journey! 🚀

About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a usability pioneer with 40 years experience in UX and the Founder of UX Tigers. He founded the discount usability movement for fast and cheap iterative design, including heuristic evaluation and the 10 usability heuristics. He formulated the eponymous Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience. Named “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine, “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today. Previously, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and a Member of Research Staff at Bell Communications Research, the branch of Bell Labs owned by the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He is the author of 8 books, including the best-selling Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (published in 22 languages), Usability Engineering (26,415 citations in Google Scholar), and the pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia (published two years before the Web launched). Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on making the Internet easier to use. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from ACM SIGCHI.

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