Transcription
I was the fastest growing new creator on LinkedIn in 2024. I went from 3,000 to more than 400,000 followers in 20 months. Most people think LinkedIn growth is about posting every day and hoping something goes viral. But that's not how I did it. I took a three-part approach that focused on positioning, creating the right type of content, and strategic commenting. In 2025, I added a fourth part: How to show up as a real human in the age of AI-generated content. The same strategy has helped hundreds of Say What users multiply their reach and build actual businesses from their LinkedIn presence. And in this video, I'm breaking down all four parts so you can implement them yourself.
So, part number one of the strategy is speaking to your whole audience. Most people either go too niche or too wide. So, you see people on one hand start talking about toxic bosses when they actually sell sales coaching. That content is not going to attract the right audience. Whereas on the other hand, you see people doing super niche content only that doesn't really make it to the target customers because the algorithm doesn't push it. Because when your content is too specific, it could often get low early engagement, which signals LinkedIn that it's not valuable, and so it doesn't end up getting distributed to the people who actually need to see it. And so it's really important to find a balance. You both want to go as wide as possible while staying relevant for your top-of-funnel content.
And so why is this important? Well, how fast you grow depends on how many people your content is relevant for. Just to give you the example that everyone knows, if you talk about toxic bosses, that is relevant to basically everyone on LinkedIn because pretty much everyone at some point in time has had a bad boss. Whereas, if you start talking about industrial manufacturing of specific parts or archaeology, that is super, super niche. And so, the number of people that it's relevant to is very small. So, if you were to speak to everyone in the archaeology niche on LinkedIn, you may have 100,000 followers, max, max, max, max, max. However, if you're speaking to everyone who's had a toxic boss, that number of people is in the millions. So, to give you that context before explaining what I did specifically.
So, when I first started posting on LinkedIn in February 2024, I talked about a couple of very relatable but quite broad topics, which were helping people level up in their careers. That means really improving at work and getting new jobs. And why did I talk about them? Because I could speak authoritatively about them because I had some pretty decent corporate experience. You know, worked at Goldman Sachs, private equity, blah, blah, blah, all that fancy stuff. And it was also something I was very passionate about. So, I ended up growing very quickly because my content was relevant for so many people.
As I built my software business, Say What, I started pivoting my content to focus on a slightly more niche audience: entrepreneurs trying to use LinkedIn to grow their businesses. And I also built a track record in actually being one of those people myself because I built a software business to more than 500K in revenue as just two people. But what that meant is I started talking about slightly different topics. So, entrepreneurship, how to build a content business, how to use AI, and still some motivational content because that stuff I really personally enjoy. So now my content is specific enough so the right people know it's for them, but it's broad enough to still scale. And obviously, I grow slower because I'm speaking to a smaller audience. And that is fine. It's just important to understand this in your business. Don't get stuck in the trap of just going super niche in all of your content or going really generic and talking about everything because you want to build a distinct brand.
Now, I'm not saying that you don't want to talk about very specific problems that you help people solve. You do. But what I'm saying is that with your top-of-funnel content, you want to make sure it's relevant to your whole target audience so that when they see your content, they know it's for them, but it speaks to all of them. So, I'll give you an example to bring this to life. There's a Say What user, Ron Under, whose business visualizes events before they happen to identify potential issues. Sounds pretty niche, but his broadest content speaks to the whole events industry because that is the potential relevant addressable audience. And let's take Justin Welsh as another example. He speaks to entrepreneurs and people who want to leave corporate to do their own thing, aka aspiring entrepreneurs. And really, your goal here is to be niche enough to be known for something, but broad enough to reach meaningful scale.
So with that, onto the second part of how I grew fast. Part number two: Create pre-validated and savable content. So what does that mean? Let's start with pre-validated. Pre-validated just means that something has worked before. Maybe it's a visual style or a topic. And really, what you're trying to do here is take lessons and take things that have worked before and then apply them to your target audience. You're not trying to copy. You're trying to take inspiration from what has worked and make a version that's relevant for your audience. And ideally, you want to be one of the earliest people on new visual trends or topics in your niche. For example, this infographic got me more than 10,000 followers early in my journey. When I first posted it, very few people had posted job interview prep infographics. So, it went bananas. I think it got more than 10 million views. So, the lesson here is that when you see some new visual style working, jump on it fast. And to do that, I just look through what's worked and say, "What's trending?" content section in the last week. Another pro tip is look at content from smaller creators.
Okay, so that's on the pre-validated part. Now, let's talk about savable content. So, here's another example post. This post got 24,484 saves, but only 15,000 likes. So, what is the insight here? A huge portion of your audience are silent lurkers. And saves tell LinkedIn that your content is highly valuable. So, what it will do is it will keep showing it to more people over time. And so the question then is, what makes content savable? Well, there's really a couple things. Let's start with the first one: Educational content. That's frameworks, step-by-step processes, templates that people can refer back to later. Although I'm not sure many people do actually ever refer back to them, but that's a separate point. My rule here is, in general, can someone print this out and use this tomorrow? If not, it's not that useful. Because the more work that someone has to do between seeing your content and using it, the less actionable and educationally useful it is.
Okay, so that's part one. Part two of creating savable content: It is usually visually appealing and there is something novel about it. My best-performing posts have often had some novel visual style. For example, like red on one side and green on the other side was something that performed really, really well for me at one point in time. And if you want to find what content is working in your space and create posts before, Say What lets you search trending content and use AI to adapt them. Click the first link in the description to start your free trial today.
Okay, so we've talked about the first two parts. Now let's talk about commenting. And I'm going to give you the honest truth on commenting. Okay, so how the algorithm works is that if you comment on other people's posts, they're more likely to support you in return. It's just a give and take relationship. If lots of people comment on your posts, it gets shown to a small portion of their audience. And what I often hear is people talking about engagement pods and how that's the secret to growing a tick. It's not really. And let me explain why. Because if lots of people comment on your post and it gets shown to a small portion of their audience and your content is crap, then they will not engage with it and it's going to die there. So you can have all the comments in the world, but if your content is not good, it will not be shown to more people. The second thing is that LinkedIn is just cracking down on this behavior. And what I often hear is people thinking that engagement pods are just some magical answer to growing a big brand. And the reality is, what's most important is creating great content and content that is savable, content that is useful, and content that speaks to a lot of people. That is what will get you more followers if that's what you care about.
So here are two examples that bring this to life. And when I looked at posts that actually perform well, the comments are usually not the differentiator. Like look at these two posts. One's got loads of impressions and one has not, and they've got very similar numbers of comments. So when it is helpful is when you're starting out and you need to build some initial momentum on your account. Okay. So what do you actually do then? One, don't use fake engagement tools. That is not good. Build relationships with people on the same journey as you. You're taking on something new. So you want to find people who are in a similar niche and have similar engagement levels because those are people who are more likely to support you and who are going to go on this journey with you. And if you can get people with bigger relevant followings to comment on your posts in an authentic way, that's also great. The thing I would say though is there are so many AI crap comments out there that you don't want to be one of those people whose comments just sound like a robot. Please, please, please don't be one of those people.
Okay? And so now let's talk about the real differentiator in 2025. In 2024, you could just lead with educational content. That is not true because AI is just everywhere. So you need to actually bring in your personal experience. I did a whole separate video on this on six different ways that you can build trust by bringing your experience into your content because now people want to hear from real people with real experience. They're happy to hear your advice, even if it's the same as someone else's, but they want to hear why they should hear it from you rather than someone else. The thing you can do here is bring in your personal experience into your hooks. And so here are a few examples. One post here, the hook is, "Everyone on my team is now smarter than me." 13,000 reactions. Why does this work? Because she's bringing in her personal experience and also admits some vulnerability. This is also a very popular topic on LinkedIn: Welcome people who are smarter than you. Next post: "I was heading into a board meeting." Again, it's the same, more than 12,000 reactions. Does the same thing. It brings a personal moment into an insight. And here's another one: "How she turned 3 million into 30 million in 24 hours." 8,000 reactions. Again, this is just a personal experience that people can't copy. Someone can't copy this post because it's not their life.
And so what is the approach here? The approach is that you start with a specific experience or story and then extract a universal lesson that your audience can apply. And this works because you're telling people why they should listen to you versus someone else.
Okay, so the lesson here is: Find your positioning sweet spot that speaks to your entire audience. Create pre-validated and savable content that keeps working for you. And lead with your experience because that's what AI can't copy. Strategic commenting helps, especially when starting out, but it's not going to be the main driver of building a big brand. Content quality and positioning matter way more. That's how I went from 3,000 to more than 400,000 followers. And if you want the tools to implement this strategy and grow your LinkedIn presence, check out Say What by clicking the first link in the description below and start your free trial today. I'll see you in the next video.