The Follow Button Is a Subscription to Your Thinking
When LinkedIn pushed creator tools into the mainstream, it quietly promoted the follow from an afterthought to a primary action — profiles that publish can lead with a Follow button, and readers use it precisely because it asks nothing of them. No request to accept, no relationship implied, no obligation to know each other. It is the lowest-friction way one professional can subscribe to another.
That friction difference shapes who ends up in each audience. Your network fills with people you have met; your follower base fills with people who have merely read you — strangers from other industries, juniors who would hesitate to request a connection, seniors who never accept them. The follower audience is broader, colder, and in publishing terms more honest: they opted into the content, not the acquaintance.
For the purchase decision, that means follower count is the number to grow when the goal is readership. A consultant building an audience for a newsletter, a founder narrating a company in public, an analyst posting weekly commentary — their working asset is circulation, and circulation on LinkedIn is denominated in followers.