How to identify LinkedIn influencers?
There are many paths to identifying LinkedIn influencers. In this article, I will explore a few of them:
- How to identify LinkedIn influencers with collaborative articles?
- How to identify LinkedIn influencers with content search?
- Dedicated tools to find LinkedIn influencers
I will also give a few tips about how to leverage LinkedIn influencers.
How to identify LinkedIn influencers with collaborative articles?
Collaborative articles are a relatively new feature of LinkedIn, released only in March 2023.
Writing contributions for collaborative articles was an easy way to gain top voice badges. As a result, many influencers contributed to those articles. Note that the gold badge system was retired in October 2024.
You can therefore identify LinkedIn influencers based on collaborative article contributions. Simply use our collaborative article miner, to get the list of contirubuters in your niche.
Once you have all the contributors you can use the Linkedin Profile Scraper phantom to enrich the list with profile’s data. You can then easily filter influencers, by looking at the follower count. Anybody with 3k+ followers is a potential influencer.
Pro tip: when using the Linkedin Profile Scraper Phantom setup email discovery. This will allow you to outreach relevant influencers via email.
How to identify LinkedIn influencers with content search?
Another way to identify relevant influencers is to use LinkedIn content search. When you do a content search on LinkedIn, the result prioritizes content with high engagement (comments & likes):
Content searches are therefore quite good for identifying thought leaders on a topic.
Content searches have the following format : https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=lead%20generation
It is easy to build a set of searches based on the target keyword. You can use this Google sheet template to do it at scale.
You can then extract the result using the LinkedIn search export phantom.
The main drawback of the content search approach is that content search typically includes a lot of companies' posts. So if you are looking for “people” you will have to filter those out. This is quite easy to do with phantombuster:
- If the result includes “ProfileUrl” it is a company’s post
- if the result includes “CompanyUrl” it is a person’s post
You can also simply chain the search export phantom with the profile scraper phantom using the “ProfileUrl” column as input. The Profile scraper will ignore all of the companies’ posts and it will enrich the list profile with the follower count, which is a great proxy for the influencer reach.
Dedicated tools to find LinkedIn influencers
So far I was presenting only solutions using Phantombuster. Phantombuster is one of my favorite tools and I would strongly recommend you to check it out, as it is a highly versatile lead gen tool.
However, when it comes to influencer search, there are a bunch of tools worth mentioning:
Favikon
Favikon is a great data mining tool dedicated to identifying influencers, and checking whether their following is genuine or fake. They are periodically publishing rankings for LinkedIn influencers. You can find the latest one here.
Those rankings can be a great starting point, however, they tend to be quite generic. If you are looking for an influencer in a specific niche, I would recommend you build your own list based on content search.
Taplio
Taplio is more of a content-creation tool. If you want to learn more about Taplio, we published an in-depth review of Taplio.
As content creation is a transversal topic to influencers, Taplio is also sharing some rankings of Influencers. You can find the ranking here.
How to leverage LinkedIn influencers?
Now to the most interesting point: what do do once you have identified relevant influencers?
There are several use cases:
- Collect feedback from super users
- Hire new affiliate
- Increase your LinkedIn reach by commenting
Super user feedbacks
LinkedIn influencers will typically have good expertise in their niche. Therefore they can provide valuable feedback on new idea. I run multiple LinkedIn outreach campaigns for this purpose.
In contact request use a message like:
Hi #firstName# I saw that you are an expert on #topic# and would like to connect.
This message usually gives a 50 to 70% acceptance rate as you are playing on the person’s ego.
In a follow-up message, you can use a message like:
Hi #firstName# I recently launched #outWebsite# I would be interested in your honest feedback about it as you are an expert in the field.
Do not pitch your product. Only ask for feedback Do not ask for a quick call. It is too much of an ask in the message.
This approach can give you some valuable feedback about your product. Cherry on top, once you are connected with those influencers you can always circle back to them later, to ask for feedback about new releases or ask them to become affiliate partners.
affiliate hiring
Affiliate marketing is a great marketing channel as you will typically pay only for conversion.
LinkedIn influencers can make for great affiliate partners as they already have followers based on Linkedin and they often have an audience on other social media too.
The drawback is that large influencers will often ask you to pay a fixed fee per post. In my experience, this is usually not ROI positive.
If an influencer is asking for payment upfront, I strongly recommend checking their profile in Favikon in order to make sure that their following and engagement aren’t fake.
I recommend focusing on influencers with 3k to 6k followers. Those are relatively small influencers but are more likely to not ask for payment upfront.
commenting to get reach
Last but not least you can simply engage with those influencer content to increase your LinkedIn reach.
If you write a genuine comment, the influencer will most likely reply. If the influencer replies your comment will have a great chance to appear on the influencer’s followers' feeds.
Do not use AI to generate comments. It will drastically lower the effectiveness of this tactic.
Pro tip: Most large influencers will use a scheduling tool to post content on LinkedIn. That can make their positing time predictable. You can use the Activity extractor Phantom to get the list of the latest posts of an influencer and check if there is a pattern in posting time. If you find a partner try to answer those posts within 5 minutes after posting. This will maximize your chances to appear on the influencer’s followers' feeds.