LinkedIn Is Selling You Three Things. None of Them Work.
LinkedIn has a remarkable ability to make you feel like you are doing something productive while you are actually doing something that benefits LinkedIn. You are posting content to build followers. You are clicking Easy Apply to find a job. You are paying for Premium to get access to people. All three of these activities generate revenue for LinkedIn. The question is whether any of them generate results for you.
Let me go through them one at a time.
Followers
Should you buy LinkedIn followers?
No.
Here is why, and here is the more interesting thing that LinkedIn doesn't tell you about followers in general.
Buying followers on LinkedIn is more obviously pointless than on most platforms because LinkedIn's algorithm is unusually transparent about what it actually rewards. Follower count is almost irrelevant to reach. What matters is engagement velocity — how many people interact with a post in the first hour after it goes live. A post from an account with 500 followers that gets 30 reactions in the first hour will outperform a post from a 50,000-follower account that gets 3. Bought followers are passive. They never engage. They make your engagement rate worse, not better.
But here is the thing that makes chasing LinkedIn followers interesting: LinkedIn itself tells you that followers matter. The platform surfaces your follower count. It congratulates you on milestones. It sends notifications when you hit round numbers. This is not because follower count is the metric that drives results. It is because follower count is the metric that keeps you on the platform, posting, engaging, building the audience that LinkedIn monetises through advertising and premium subscriptions.
LinkedIn's revenue comes from advertisers and from premium subscribers. Both of those revenue streams depend on you spending time on LinkedIn. The follower count is the gamification mechanism that keeps you there.
For company pages: an admin can invite 250 connections per month to follow the page. At a 10-20% acceptance rate, that's 25-50 followers per month from active effort. Posting consistently does not guarantee followers — it guarantees impressions, which are a different thing. Going viral is the only organic path to rapid follower growth, and viral is not a strategy.
The counterintuitive truth about LinkedIn reach is that roughly 90% of a post's distribution goes to people who don't follow the account. LinkedIn's algorithm surfaces content to non-followers based on engagement signals. This means that followers matter much less than most people think — and that the entire effort of building a follower base is less valuable than the platform implies.
Easy Apply
Easy Apply is one of LinkedIn's most useful features for job seekers. It allows you to apply to a role in seconds, using your existing profile, without navigating to an external careers page. It reduces friction. It increases application volume. From the candidate's perspective, it feels like efficiency.
From the company's perspective, it is a follower acquisition tool.
When you click Easy Apply on a company's job posting, LinkedIn automatically prompts you to follow that company if you don't already. Many candidates do this without noticing. Companies that post Easy Apply jobs with high visibility — "AI Engineer," "Head of Growth," "Senior Product Manager" — can acquire thousands of followers from a single posting, from candidates who are engaged enough with the company to apply for a role.
This is why a significant number of Easy Apply postings are not real jobs. Paying for a prominent LinkedIn job posting is expensive. But the follower acquisition value of that posting — reaching thousands of relevant professionals who would never otherwise encounter the brand, getting them to follow the company page with a single click — can justify the cost even if the role is never filled.
The tell is the application volume. LinkedIn Premium and Sales Navigator users can sometimes see how many people have applied to a role. Seeing 3,000 or 5,000 applications on a posting is a signal that something is wrong. No hiring manager processes 5,000 applications for a single role. If the number of applications exceeds any reasonable hiring capacity, the job is marketing.
The candidates who applied spent time on their applications. They updated their profiles. They waited for responses that never came. They concluded they weren't good enough. The more accurate conclusion is that the job was an advertisement, and they were the audience.
This is not unique to iGaming — though Malta's iGaming sector has been particularly active with AI-related job postings that follow this pattern — but it is more common in sectors where brand positioning matters and where the gap between "we use AI" and "we are building AI" is large and commercially important to obscure.
Premium
LinkedIn Premium costs between $40 and $139 per month depending on the tier. The core value propositions are: see who viewed your profile, send InMail to people you're not connected to, and access additional data about job postings and candidates.
Is it worth it?
For most people: no.
"Who viewed your profile" is interesting for approximately 48 hours after you activate Premium and then becomes background noise. The viewers are mostly recruiters from companies you've never heard of, looking for people with skills you may not have, for salaries they won't disclose. Occasionally someone relevant views your profile. Occasionally they don't reach out. Premium doesn't change that.
InMail is the more substantive value proposition. The ability to message anyone on LinkedIn, bypassing the connection requirement, sounds powerful. The reality is that InMail response rates average around 15%. That means for every 100 InMails you send, 85 people don't respond. At $139 per month for a Career or Business plan, you're paying a significant amount for a channel with an 85% ignore rate.
The comparison that matters:
LinkedIn Premium: $139/month. InMail response rate: ~15%. Reach: limited to LinkedIn. Algorithm dependency: high — LinkedIn controls who sees your messages and can change the rules at any time.
Instantly: $47/month. Inbox reach: unlimited email accounts, 5,000-500,000+ emails per month. Algorithm dependency: zero — you own the channel. AI reply handling: included. Meeting booking: autonomous.
The gap is not close. AI-powered sales agents have changed the cold outreach equation completely. Personalisation at scale — the thing that used to require a human to write every email — is now automated. The SDR that never sleeps, never gets demotivated, and costs $47 per month is not a metaphor. It is a product category that exists.
What Actually Works
The platforms and tools that consistently deliver results for outbound sales and lead generation share a common characteristic: they operate on channels you own, with audiences you've built, through mechanisms that don't depend on a third-party algorithm deciding whether your message gets seen.
Email is the clearest example. You own the list. The message goes to the inbox. The open rate doesn't depend on whether LinkedIn decided today was a good day to show your content. The response depends on whether the email was worth responding to.
Lemlist handles the deliverability problem — warm-up, domain health, spam avoidance — and adds personalisation at scale. Instantly adds AI that reads replies, responds to interested leads, and books meetings without human intervention. Apollo adds a 250 million contact database if you need to build the list from scratch.
For lead generation, the combination of a verified contact list, personalised email sequences, and AI reply handling produces better results than LinkedIn Premium at a lower cost, with full control over the channel.
LinkedIn is a good platform for content distribution, brand visibility, and warm outreach to people you already have some connection with. It is an expensive and unreliable platform for cold outreach. The Premium product exists to extract money from people who haven't made this distinction yet.
The followers aren't the metric. The Easy Apply jobs aren't the jobs. The Premium isn't the advantage.
LinkedIn is very good at making you feel like you're building something while you're actually building LinkedIn.
FreeMalta covers business, technology, and the tools that actually work. Instantly and Lemlist are FreeMalta partners.
