LinkedIn strategy for accountants is often discussed, but rarely has any data behind it. In this article, I am going to pull in some data points that help us get a clearer picture of what is happening when it comes to the top performing LinkedIn profiles … for UK accountants.
I want to be clear about something before we go any further. This piece is not a ranking of who is doing marketing well. It is not a verdict on anyone’s commercial success. And it is absolutely not a suggestion that follower count on LinkedIn determines the value of an accountant to their clients, their community or their profession.
What it is is an attempt to do something simple. To look at publicly available data, ask some honest questions of it, and see what it tells us.
That is what market research is for. Not to provide answers. To sharpen the questions.
A data-led approach to LinkedIn strategy for accountants
Every month, Dermot and ACCT publish the LinkedIn Top 100 UK Accountancy Followers leaderboard. It tracks the follower counts of accountants and people connected to the profession across LinkedIn. Dermot is clear about its limitations. It is designed to be fun. It does not capture every influential voice in the profession. Plenty of people doing important, valuable work never appear on it.
But I found myself looking at six months of data, covering 130 accounts tracked between January and June 2026, and wondering what questions it could answer if you asked the right ones.
So I started asking.
I looked at follower growth month by month. I looked at who was climbing, who was holding and who was quietly declining. I looked at content strategies, comment sections and the commercial ecosystems sitting behind the LinkedIn profiles of eight accounts in depth. I selected accounts from across the leaderboard, top, middle and lower positions, and across both genders, to get as broad a picture as possible of what different strategies look like in practice. I formed eight theories and tested them against what the data actually showed.
This is what I found.
A note on what this research can and cannot tell you
Before the findings, the caveats. Because there are always caveats.
This research looks at LinkedIn only. I have not looked at what is happening on other platforms, in email newsletters, at events, in the press or in the relationships that exist entirely offline. It cannot tell you whether any of these accounts are winning clients, growing revenue or building the kind of reputation that results in referrals at dinner parties.
What it can tell you is what is publicly visible on LinkedIn. The content being posted. The engagement it attracts. The comment sections. The profile positioning. The cross-platform signals that are visible from the outside.
The leaderboard tells you what is happening. The profile analysis attempts to explain why.
That is enough to be useful. But it is not the whole picture. Anyone who tells you LinkedIn data alone can prove commercial success is selling you something.
Being in the top 100 means you have built a significant LinkedIn following within or adjacent to the accountancy profession. It does not mean you are the most commercially successful, the most influential or the most effective marketer in the room. Some of the most strategically sharp accountants I encountered in this data sit quietly in positions 70 to 100. Position on a follower leaderboard is a measure of accumulation, not quality.
With that said, here is what the data shows.
Eight questions. Eight theories. What the data says.
1. Do you need a large following to win on LinkedIn?
Theory: You don’t need a large audience. You need the right one.
It is an age-old question, right? Is bigger always better? I looked at three accounts to find out.
A quick look at Enver Kannur’s profile from ADPL LLP shows that he has spent years building a genuinely warm and diverse community on LinkedIn. Nearly 17,000 followers across the Turkish business network in London, City of London connections and international professionals.
His content reflects that breadth. VAT updates sit alongside Chelsea FC posts, Turkish poetry, wellness reflections and ACCA news. His target audience, as described on his own profile, is UK SME owners and international companies looking to establish in the UK.
The question the data raises is whether a more focused content strategy aimed directly at that audience would help his accounting posts reach the right people more consistently. When content lands in front of a broad audience with mixed relevance, engagement tends to be lower. Lower engagement signals to the algorithm that the content is less relevant, which reduces its reach further. The size of the network is not the problem. The question is whether it is the right network for the content that matters most to his business.
In contrast, Carrie Stokes at Spotlight Accounting has just over 10,000 followers. A single post about inheritance tax planning generated 13 substantive comments from property investors, financial planners and business owners in her local Shropshire area. Her audience and her target clients are much more closely aligned.
The contrast is not about follower count or even reaction numbers. It is about whether the people showing up are the people who could buy from you.
The data consistently shows that follower count and engagement quality are not the same thing. An account built over many years through connection requests, reposts and a broad range of content can accumulate a large following that is largely disengaged with the content that would actually matter to potential clients.
Paul Miller FCA at Cornish Accounting sits at position 95 but has built one of the most developed content ecosystems in the dataset. A book, a podcast series, a VIP community and consistent engagement from peers who show up to have real conversations rather than leave a reaction and scroll on. His positioning around family businesses in Cornwall is clear and his commercial infrastructure is more developed than many accounts sitting 50 places above him.
The honest observation from the data is that his engaged community is primarily the accounting profession. Peers who respect him and follow his work. Whether that peer visibility is converting into family business owners in Cornwall finding and choosing him is something we cannot see from the outside. What we can say is that the ecosystem is there. The next question is whether the right people are walking through the door.
2. Should you spend more time commenting than creating?
Theory: The most visible accountants are creators. Commenting keeps you warm but does not compound.
There is advice circulating on LinkedIn that tells you to spend more time commenting than creating. Show up in other people’s feeds. Be generous. Let the relationships do the work.
It is not wrong. But it is incomplete.
The data suggests there are three distinct approaches, and the right one depends on where you are in your LinkedIn journey.
The strongest strategy is creating content across multiple platforms and letting each one feed the others. The accounts growing fastest in this dataset are not LinkedIn-only. Grace Hardy’s growth reflects TikTok, Instagram and a Forbes 30 Under 30 feature all pointing back to LinkedIn. Cheryl Sharp’s acceleration came when BBC, LBC and HR Magazine appearances started driving people to her profile. Cross-platform content compounds in a way that single-platform content simply cannot.
The second approach is creating and engaging on one platform consistently. Karl Roberts posts almost daily on one topic to one audience and has built a large LinkedIn following and a 6,700 subscriber newsletter largely from that LinkedIn presence. Carrie Stokes consistently creates and comments strategically in the feeds of local business owners rather than accounting peers. Both are growing steadily and attracting commercially relevant audiences.
The third approach is engaging before you create. Building the right audience first by showing up, contributing and being genuinely useful before you have anything to promote. The data from this research does not give us a clean example of this in action. But from my own experience of entering the accounting profession as an outsider, it was the approach I took. I focused on building the right audience before I created content. I contributed before I took. That principle matters because LinkedIn audiences built through generosity tend to be more engaged than audiences built through broadcasting. The caveat is that it only works if you are engaging with your target audience rather than defaulting to the community you already know.
The approach that does not work is engaging only within the accounting profession with no content of your own. You give people no reason to follow you beyond professional proximity. Looking across the accounts in this dataset where reposting and commenting dominate over original content creation, growth is consistently the most modest. In some cases accounts with years of LinkedIn activity and thousands of followers are adding fewer than 50 followers a month. Presence without content does not compound.
Where you comment matters as much as how often. Commenting on other accounting content is great for your educational and supportive community. Commenting on your audience’s content builds a commercial one.
3. Can LinkedIn work in isolation?
Theory: Not really. It works much better as part of a broader content model.
This is the finding I want to be most careful about, because the data can only show me what is visible.
What I can say is this. Every account in this dataset showing strong, consistent growth has visible indicators of activity beyond LinkedIn. Newsletters. Podcasts. Local networking. Media appearances. Webinars. Events. Books.
What I cannot say is whether those things are driving LinkedIn growth or whether LinkedIn is driving those things. Which came first is impossible to say from the outside.
What the data does show is that the accounts with the most developed commercial infrastructure, the ones with clear destinations for interested people beyond the LinkedIn follow button, appear to be getting more from their LinkedIn presence than those without it.
Karl Roberts has a newsletter of 6,700 subscribers, two paid courses, a free book and a waitlist programme, all visible from his LinkedIn profile. Carrie Stokes has a podcast, a newsletter, local networking and a financial workshop series. Grace Hardy has TikTok, Instagram, press coverage and Accountex appearances. In every case LinkedIn is one expression of something broader.
LinkedIn as your only marketing channel is a fragile strategy. The accounts in this dataset with the most developed presence are not relying on LinkedIn to do everything. They are using it as the most visible part of something bigger. LinkedIn as the front door to a broader content model is a very different proposition to LinkedIn as the whole house.
4. Are you visible to the right people?
Theory: Most accountants on this leaderboard are highly visible to other accountants and largely invisible to potential clients.
This was the most consistent pattern across the entire dataset and the one with the most significant implications for any accountant thinking seriously about LinkedIn as a business development tool.
I looked carefully at the comment sections of multiple accounts. The people showing up and engaging are overwhelmingly other accountants, software vendors, bookkeepers and people adjacent to the profession.
That is not surprising. LinkedIn’s algorithm shows your content to people who are similar to those already engaging with it. If your early followers were accountants, your content will continue to reach accountants. The echo chamber is partly structural, not just strategic.
But there is a layer worth paying attention to. Some of the most engaged accounts on this leaderboard are not accountants serving business owners. They are suppliers serving accountants. Software companies. Consultants. Coaches. Their strategy is built around reaching accountants because accountants are their clients. Following their lead if your clients are business owners is a fundamental misdirection. You would be optimising for the wrong room entirely.
The accounts breaking out of this pattern are doing so deliberately. Carrie Stokes is the clearest example in this dataset. Her comment activity is not in accounting feeds. It is in the feeds of a mortgage broker, a modular building company director, a portable buildings firm and local Shropshire business networks. These are not peers. These are potential clients. She is showing up where her ideal clients already are, which is precisely what the LinkedIn advice says to do, but she is doing it with the right audience rather than the comfortable one.
The question worth asking of your own LinkedIn presence is not how many people are following you. It is who is following you and whether those people are capable of becoming clients.
5. Does engagement equal commercial intent?
Theory: Personal content drives reach. Professional content drives clients.
The data on this is striking and consistent across almost every account in the dataset. Hayleigh Barrett at BarrettStacey is a clear example. Her sobriety post attracted 65 reactions and 29 comments from business owners and people outside the profession. Her MTD compliance post attracted a fraction of that, primarily from accounting peers.
Personal posts, those sharing a life moment, a milestone, a struggle or a human story, attract significantly more reactions and comments than professional posts sharing technical knowledge or client scenarios.
This makes sense. Personal content is relatable. It attracts visible engagement – reactions and comments from a broad audience. But the professional content, the specific, useful, technically precise posts, may be doing more quiet work than the reaction count suggests. Saves, shares and link clicks are not visible metrics from the outside. The post with 6 reactions and a link to a lead magnet may be outperforming the post with 60 reactions and a life update in every metric that matters commercially. We simply cannot see that from where we are sitting.
From the accounts we looked at in depth, a pattern emerged. The reactions on personal posts tend to come from a broad, warm, largely peer-based audience. The comments on precise, technically specific professional content, when they come, tend to come from people with genuine questions. People who might need an accountant. We did not track this systematically across all 130 accounts so it is an observation rather than a finding. But it is consistent enough across the profiles we analysed to be worth naming
The most commercially effective accounts in this dataset have worked out how to use personal content to build reach and professional content to attract buyers. They are not choosing one or the other. They understand that the two serve different purposes and deploy them accordingly.
6. Does gender affect LinkedIn growth in accountancy?
Theory: No. Growth is determined by strategy not gender.
Accountancy is a male dominated profession. So the assumption most people would make looking at a leaderboard like this is that men dominate the growth picture too.
The data tells a different story.
Only one-third of the top 100 accounts tracked are women. But when you look at consistent month on month growth, green highlights, climbing positions and standout follower increases, women dominate the growing accounts significantly. For an industry where men outnumber women considerably, that is a striking finding.
I want to be careful here because correlation is not causation and the sample size has limits.
What I can observe is that the content strategies driving the strongest growth, personal narrative, mission-led posting, community building that extends beyond the profession, are more prevalent among the women on this leaderboard than the men. Grace Hardy grew by over 7,000 followers in six months, with a Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition driving a significant spike in May alone. Cheryl Sharp built a new commercially relevant audience through mission-led content around domestic abuse in the workplace, attracting HR professionals and employers alongside her existing accounting network. Both are growing by reaching well beyond the accounting profession.
The men growing most strongly are doing so through completely different strategies. Karl Roberts posts almost daily on one precise topic, has built a commercial ecosystem of courses, newsletters and programmes around it, and his growth is steady and consistent rather than driven by moments. Different approach, similar discipline.
It is worth noting that in managing LinkedIn accounts for accountants for years, I can tell you the connection acceptance rate for male accounts is significantly lower than for female accounts. Whether that reflects who is sending the requests, who is receiving them, or something about how LinkedIn users perceive and respond to different profiles is impossible to say with certainty. But it is a consistent pattern, and it may partly explain why women are building audiences faster even when posting with similar frequency.
The finding is not that women are better at LinkedIn. It is that the strategies performing best on LinkedIn right now align more closely with how many of the women on this leaderboard have chosen to communicate. And that the path to growth looks different depending on which strategy you choose, regardless of gender.
7. Does video outperform written posts?
Theory: Video performs better on LinkedIn
The honest answer here is that the data is directional rather than conclusive. I did not track post format systematically across all 130 accounts, and I cannot make a definitive claim.
What I can say is that the accounts with the strongest commercially relevant engagement in this dataset are primarily written content creators. The most engaged posts I encountered were detailed, specific, text-based posts about real client scenarios with real numbers.
Video appears to drive reach. Written content appears to drive depth of engagement. But whether that holds across the full dataset is a question worth further research rather than a finding I can stand behind with confidence.
8. Does posting frequency affect growth?
Theory: Consistency matters more than volume. Frequency without focus produces noise.
The data supports this clearly.
The accounts growing most consistently post regularly and on a clear, single topic. Karl Roberts posts almost daily, entirely on one subject, helping limited company business owners understand their numbers. His newsletter has over 6,700 subscribers. He says his accounting practice has been oversubscribed for two years. His LinkedIn presence and his commercial infrastructure are the same thing expressed in different formats. The accounts posting most frequently but across a wide range of subjects show significantly lower engagement rates relative to their follower counts and more modest growth.
Frequency matters. But frequency in service of a consistent, focused message compounds over time in a way that frequency alone simply does not.
The one caveat the data raises is Grace Hardy, who posts irregularly but grew faster than almost anyone in the dataset. The difference is that her growth is driven by external platforms and credential moments feeding back into LinkedIn rather than LinkedIn posting frequency itself. Which loops back to Theory 3. LinkedIn rarely works in isolation
What the data cannot tell you
It cannot tell you who is winning clients. It cannot tell you whose phone is ringing. It cannot tell you who built their following last year versus over a decade. It cannot tell you what is happening in the DMs, at the networking events, on the podcasts or in the referral conversations that never touch LinkedIn at all.
What it can tell you is what is visible. And what is visible, interrogated honestly, is enough to be useful.
What this means in practice
Market research sets the strategy. Deploying the strategy creates the value.
Looking at data like this is not the point. The point is what you do with it. The questions it surfaces about your own LinkedIn presence. The assumptions it challenges. The decisions it helps you make with slightly more confidence than you had before.
If you are an accounting firm thinking seriously about LinkedIn, here are the questions worth sitting with:
Who is actually engaging with your content? Are they potential clients or professional peers?
Is your LinkedIn presence part of a broader content model or is it the whole strategy?
Is your message consistent enough that someone scrolling back through six months of your posts could tell you instantly what you do and who you do it for?
Do you have a commercial destination, somewhere for an interested person to go beyond the follow button?
These are not complicated questions. But most people in this dataset, even those with tens of thousands of followers, could not answer all four with confidence.
A final thought
The key learning from six months of data and eight theories is simpler than it might appear. You must understand your audience before you can build one worth having.
Follower count is a measure of accumulation. Engagement quality is a measure of relevance. The gap between the two is where most LinkedIn strategies quietly fail. And that gap almost always traces back to the same root cause. Not knowing clearly enough who you are trying to reach and why they would choose you.
Before LinkedIn strategy, there is audience strategy. And before audience strategy, there is niche clarity. If you are not sure whether your niche is strong and profitable enough to build an audience worth having, the Neesh Diagnostic was built to help you find out
Kelli Doorne-Millott is the founder of Neesh.Agency, a specialist marketing agency for accounting firms. Neesh works as an outsourced marketing function, helping firms find and compound their niche.