Your connection count isn't doing what you think it's doing

Let’s say you come back from a conference with 200 business cards. You file them in a drawer and never call a single one. If I ask you who’s in there a month later, you couldn’t tell me. Yet on paper, you “know” 200 people in your industry.

That's basically what a LinkedIn connection count is for a lot of founders: a drawer full of business cards they never call.

The shortcut everyone thinks they're taking

Here's a thing people assume about LinkedIn: the more connections you have, the more people see your posts. More reach, more opportunity, just sitting there. It's an easy number to grow too, accept requests, send a few, and you will make your profile look busy and well-connected in no time.

But this is what’s really happening: LinkedIn doesn't show your posts to everyone you're connected to just because you're connected. Same as every other social media platform at this point, it shows people what they actually engage with and what could be of interest to them. 

So if you've got 30,000 connections, you're not getting 30,000 people seeing your next post. You're getting whoever LinkedIn thinks actually cares, and someone who's never once engaged with anything you've posted isn't on that list, no matter how long you've been "connected."

The count never did anything for you. The engagement always did. 

What is the number telling you? 

Your connection count tells you how many invites got accepted. It doesn't reveal how many of those people would recognize your name if it came up in a meeting, or pick up if you called them needing something. Those are two completely different things, but only one of them matters to you as a founder.

Think about the last time you needed something important from your network. An introduction, a recommendation, someone to talk through a problem who'd actually been there before. You didn't scroll through a list of thousands to find that person. You already knew exactly who to message, because it was someone you'd actually kept up with.

So how do you actually build a good one?

The slow way, honestly. Pay attention to specific people over time. Remember what they're working on, and bring it up next time you talk to them instead of starting from scratch. When someone comments on your post, reply like you mean it, then go comment on theirs too. Follow up on conversations instead of letting them end the second the notification stops. And it's fine to say no sometimes, you don't owe every connection request an accept just because declining feels awkward.

LinkedIn shows your content to people who actually engage with you, not everyone you're technically connected to. So the people replying to your comments and reacting to your posts, those are the ones LinkedIn keeps putting your work in front of. Build that with even a small group of people, and you get both at once. A handful of people who'd actually pick up the phone, and a feed that keeps showing your posts to the people who'd stop and read them.

By Romy Abdallah