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Tag: thought leaders

  • As LinkedIn’s Influencer Program Grows, Richard Branson Hits 1 Million Followers

    As LinkedIn’s Influencer Program Grows, Richard Branson Hits 1 Million Followers

    At the beginning of October, LinkedIn debuted their new “Influencer” initiative, which allowed users to follow specific “thought leaders” across the network. At the outset, about 150 thought leaders from various industries were included in the program, which allowed them to publish long-form articles and presentations for their follower base.

    At the one-month mark, we told you that Virgin’s Richard Branson had emerged as the star of the LinkedIn Influencers, garnering over 750,000 followers four weeks. At that time, LinkedIn also added a couple of new features like a thought leader scoreboard and new sorting mechanisms.

    And today, LinkedIn is announcing that Sir Richard Branson is officially the first person to reach the 1 million follower milestone. That’s nearly double the follower count of the next closest thought leader – President Obama.

    “Like many of our Influencers, Branson has been posting about entrepreneurship, paths to success, and the keys to balancing good work and a good life. His five tips for starting a successful business has nearly 500,000 pageviews; his 197-word article suggesting that happiness is the best measure of success drew close to 3,500 comments. Our data shows that he’s popular with everyone from entrepreneurs to HR workers and in industries ranging from tech to construction (Dig deeper into the data in the related SlideShare below). The only continent where he doesn’t have a single follower is Antarctica,” says LinkedIn’s Daniel Roth.

    Alongside the announcement of Branson’s success on the platform, LinkedIn is providing some new statistics about the Influencers initiative in general. They now have 170 thought leaders for users to follow, and over 6 million users have chosen to follow one of them. There have been over 1,000 original posts by the thought leaders, which have generated more than 11 million views and 80,000 comments.

  • Richard Branson and Barack Obama Are Your Most-Followed LinkedIn Thought Leaders

    Richard Branson and Barack Obama Are Your Most-Followed LinkedIn Thought Leaders

    The people of LinkedIn have spoken. After the first month of the social network allowing them to follow “thought leaders,” they have elected Sir Richard Branson as the most thought leadery of all. With 757,000+ followers, he is the the most-followed public figure on LinkedIn.

    President Obama comes in second with 389,000+ followers. Deepak Chopra, Mitt Romney, and Arianna Huffington round out the top five with 195,000, 156,000, and 128,000 followers, respectively.

    The reason we know this is that LinkedIn has added a few new sorting mechanisms for their thought leaders initiative. Starting today, you can find “influencer” by most recent content postings, alphabetically, and of course via the new “scoreboard” which tracks who has the most followers.

    LinkedIn first let users follow top influencers back at the beginning of October. After allow users to follow companies and groups for some time, LinkedIn finally decided that following important personalities would help users get more value from the service. At the onset, the “thought leaders” totalled 150, but LinkedIn is in the process of expanding that offering.

    Here are some stats at the one-month mark, courtesy the LinkedIn blog:

    “Earlier this month, we launched the ability to follow thought leaders on LinkedIn. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen more than 4 million follows of these influencers, whose ranks have expanded to include the likes of the co-founder of Reddit as well as the CEOs of Gallup, Box, and Zillow. Together, these thought leaders have created more than 850 original posts, including our most popular post Five top tips to starting a successful business by Sir Richard Branson.”

    So – Rihanna is the queen of Facebook, and Lady Gaga rules Twitter. We’ll go ahead and give LinkedIn to Richard Branson…for now.