654 - Why Follower Count No Longer Predicts What a CEO Reaches
Jens Heitland explains why follower count no longer predicts reach on platforms like LinkedIn, how the algorithm tests content on a small sample before distributing it further, and why CEOs should measure public presence by business results rather than audience size.
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Why Follower Count No Longer Predicts What a CEO Reaches
We had a conversation the other day about follower growth, the kind of number most executives glance at without really questioning what it tells them. It's a reasonable number to look at. It is not the number that matters, and the reason why has changed more in the last two years than most people watching their own LinkedIn analytics have noticed.
The old model was simple. You posted, your followers saw it, and the count of those followers roughly predicted your reach. That model no longer describes what LinkedIn actually does. The platform now runs something closer to a live test. A new post goes out to a small sample first, a handful of people who follow you and a handful who don't, and the platform watches what happens. Who stops scrolling? Who reads to the end. Who reacts, comments, or shares. Based on that early signal, the post either gets pushed further into a wider audience or it quietly stops moving. Your follower count barely factors into that decision. What factors in is whether the fifty or so people who saw it first actually cared.
This changes what a follower count can honestly tell you. It used to function as a rough proxy for reach. Now it functions mostly as a vanity number, visible on a profile, satisfying to watch climb, but disconnected from whether any individual post performs. A CEO with 200,000 followers can post something that reaches 3,000 people. A CEO with four thousand followers can post something that reaches two hundred thousand. The algorithm is not rewarding the account. It is rewarding the specific piece of content, tested in real time against a small sample of real reactions.
The consequence of missing this is that a lot of leadership time gets spent optimizing for the wrong thing. Chasing followers feels like progress because the number moves, and moving numbers feel like results. But a follower count has never driven a deal, closed a capital raise, or convinced a board member that this CEO understands where the market is going. What drives those things is whether the content itself, when tested against real engagement, actually reaches the people who matter and represents the company as it needs to be represented.
This is where I think most people lose the thread. As a CEO, your public presence is not there to accumulate an audience for its own sake. It exists to drive business results, and in a public-facing role, that means every piece of content is functioning as a representation of the company, tested in real time by an algorithm that does not care how many followers you have. The follower count will keep climbing regardless, slowly, as a side effect of good content. But it was never the goal, and treating it as one means optimizing for a number that stopped mattering the moment platforms started testing content before they ever look at who is following you.
Highlights:
00:00 Followers Don’t Matter
00:13 How LinkedIn Tests Posts
00:58 Why Followers Aren’t The Goal
01:09 CEO Focus On Results
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Transcript :
We had this conversation the other day. So we looked at the followers and how is the increase of the followers. And yes, it's kind of an interesting number to look at, but in the end, the followers doesn't really matter. If we look at what happened over maybe even over the last two years, but at least it's happening definitely right now, is that let's use LinkedIn as the example. So LinkedIn is promoting certain posts. They don't promote it first and foremost, like in the old days, to all your followers. They are basically doing an AI algorithm where they look into, we shoot it to five people like this, we shoot it to five people like that, and then to, to a couple of others, and some of them are your followers. And then they kind of test the water, who is interested in what and how many people of that are reacting, consuming the content, and then they're pushing more and more and more into the people that like it, consume it. That means if you look at LinkedIn followers as an example, yes, they see what you do and it's good to have followers, but it's not the metric to strive towards. In the end, if you look at the CEO, it's all about how do you drive business results, which means in a public-facing context is how do you as a CEO represent the company in the best possible way so it drives business results. And that's basics, but a lot of people don't understand it