“What’s the difference between following and connecting with someone on LinkedIn?”
I am often asked this question, and so I thought I would dedicate a blog post to it, in case you were wondering about it as well.
This was the big reason I didn’t turn on Creator Mode – I didn’t want people to just be able to follow me without connecting with me and be able to see all of my content.
But according to LinkedIn, you don’t have to worry about that because there are things people can’t see by just following you.
In addition, people can still connect with you, they just have to go through an additional step as the follow button becomes your preferred method of connecting with others.
So here are the major difference between the two ways of connecting with others.
Connections are members who connected on LinkedIn because they know and trust each other.
If you’re connected to someone, you will both be able to see each other’s shares and updates on your LinkedIn homepages. You can also send messages to your connections on LinkedIn.
By default, you will follow your 1st degree connections, and you can always unfollow them.
Following someone on LinkedIn allows you to see the person’s posts and articles on your homepage without being connected to them. However, the person you’re following won’t see your posts.
You can reach a larger audience by allowing others to follow your activity and read what you’re sharing on LinkedIn. That’s why you should turn on Creator Mode IF you have more than 500 connections.
I’ll cover what kind of content you should post in creator mode in my next post.
I’m excited to see how my network and brand grows with Creator Mode and its features since I’ve been able to build my brand without it up until now and gain 11K followers on LinkedIn.
I’ll report back in a couple of months!