Who Are The Real LinkedIn Pulse Influencers? Top Ten Contributors Identified

Let’s talk about LinkedIn, the largest online professional network with more than 433 million global members. And, in the two plus years since LinkedIn Pulse transformed from a platform for a small group of designated influencers to share their content to a true UGC content platform, roughly two million users have published articles on LinkedIn Pulse. Yet there is virtually no data currently available about the influence and ranking of LinkedIn Pulse authors.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In 2012, LinkedIn launched its Influencer program, in which they handpicked 500 industry leaders the likes of  Bill Gates and Guy Kawasaki to join the LinkedIn Influencer program. In 2013, the company acquired Pulse as a content publishing platform for these influencers, and in the following year the gates of the content network opened to everyone. Two years later, LinkedIn Influencers are still the only Pulse authors that are ranked and actively promoted by the social network. This lack of data intrigued me, so I set out  to identify the top ten LinkedIn Pulse influencers by the amount of readers they attract. I found that only half of the leading LinkedIn Pulse contributors are LinkedIn Influencers. Read on for my full findings.

Leading LinkedIn Pulse Influencers Q1 2016

By analyzing three months of traffic and engagement on LinkedIn Pulse I discovered that Travis Bradberry is the king of Linkedin Pulse (he also wrote the all time most read post).

Seeing Bill Gates near the bottom of this list motivated me to investigate the differences between authors, looking into the type of content they create and the frequency it’s published.

Here’s what I’ve learned from investigating the activity of leading LinkedIn Pulse authors:

1. A constant stream of content is mandatory: The most influential authors publish regularly, with those publishing every couple of days taking the lead.
2. Follower amounts are good indications, but don't tell the full story: With 955K followers, Ryan has 1.3 times more followers than Bradberry, but attracts fewer readers. On the other hand, Profeta only has 5.5K followers, but more readers than Ryan in this period.
3. Some topics are more popular than others: Professional topics, such as job hunting tips and emotional intelligence, are more relevant to LinkedIn and therefore attract more eyeballs.

Bottom line: To unleash the full potential of your content and position yourself as an influencer you need to constantly pump out well written and valuable content. And make sure to match the topics to the audience and the content distribution platform, to ensure you maximize your reach.

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Noa Shavit is the Content Marketing Manager at Jumpshot, a Marketing Analytics platform that provides  a full picture of consumers’ online lives, from what they searching for, where they go, what they do there and how they get from place to place.