Hashtag ... Who?
With LinkedIn followers numbering in the six and seven figures, career influencers you’ve never heard of have an enormous megaphone.
Most top influencers on LinkedIn have never run a large-scale business … let alone been chosen by a board of directors to helm a multinational.
March 26, 2025
Liz Ryan doesn’t seem like a celebrity. If you stopped for a chat with the mother of five at the grocery store, you’d notice her flaming red hair, dimples, and obvious intelligence, and you’d continue on. “No one asks for my autograph,” she jokes. Her LinkedIn résumé includes her stint on stage as Mother Abbess in a Loveland, Colorado, production of The Sound of Music. (“Wore the habit, sang ‘Climb Every Mountain.’”)
Most likely, you haven’t heard of Ryan’s New York-based company, Human Workplace, which she founded in 2012. And you’d be forgiven if you forgot to download her 2025 Career Guide—or never heard of it in the first place.
But if her name doesn’t ring a bell, trust us, you’re missing out. With just shy of 3 million followers on LinkedIn, and many more across the 2,500 advice articles she has published in Forbes, Ryan happens to be among the most-read career experts in the world. That’s right: 3 million followers—roughly the population of Chicago! This puts her among a small, powerful group of influencers on LinkedIn, many of whom command enormous followings, and whose word is often taken as career gospel.
Historically, the voices of American business—the business and career experts who have landed lucrative speaking tours and book deals—have been a hodgepodge of CEOs, founders, academics, and talking heads. The reality today is much different: Most top influencers on LinkedIn have never run a large-scale business, managed a significant number of employees, or conducted research on workplace topics, let alone been chosen by a board of directors to helm a multinational. They might have dropped out of the corporate world years ago, or never entered it in the first place. If you read their bios, in fact, one common denominator is their lack of experience in corporate channels, alongside phrases like “15 years experience” in the bio of a 28-year-old.
To be sure, the professional world benefits from an influx of thoughtful and diverse perspectives. And this is exactly what these high-powered but mild-mannered influencers offer. But if you dig into their résumés, it’s usually not apparent how they managed to climb to the top. With so many followers, they wield a megaphone that’s among the most powerful in social media. Anyone who ever slogged through writing LinkedIn posts without attracting more than three likes has to envy these influencers. Inevitably, the questions race through your mind: Who are these people? What’s their secret to so many followers? “I’m equal parts inspired, impressed, and—OK, fine—a little envious,” says Justin Belmont, CEO of marketing agency Prose Media in New York. “Do I want to be them? Who doesn’t?”
#The Early Influencers
To understand LinkedIn influencers, you need to first understand the origin of the whole concept of a business influencer. Since the industrial revolution, the reach of such experts has extended across books, articles, and speeches. Dale Carnegie set the gold standard, building a juggernaut lecture tour and selling over 30 million copies of his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). He too was a hustler: His birth name was Carnagey, which he changed to Carnegie at age 31 because of its easy spelling and assumed association with tycoon Andrew Carnegie, to whom he was not related.
Today’s professional influencers invariably flock to LinkedIn as their home arena; it is, after all, the world’s most dominant professional-networking platform, hosting north of 1 billion users, 230 million of them in the US. To put those figures in perspective, that’s nine out of 10 adults in America. Yes, there are other professional social-media platforms, but LinkedIn is omnipresent—the Facebook of the business world—and provides one-stop shopping for B2B customers. The platform has been owned by Microsoft since 2016.
Tricks of the Trade
Admit it—you’d love to have a million followers on LinkedIn, but you can’t seem to get past 1,900. Though the platform relies on a tricky and constantly changing algorithm, the top influencers say there’s a playbook for maximizing followers.
Nerd Out on Data
Who are your followers? What topics interest them most? What time of day sees the highest viewership? Analytics can track which demographics are responding most often.
Be a Joiner
Groups access wider audiences, and so does sending out 20 connection requests per day to industry bigwigs.
Get Mentioned
A mention in another high-traffic influencer's post is the way to grow. Ditto for mentioning them in yours—but even LinkedIn warns that "this tactic can quickly become spammy."
Your Posting Scheduler Is Your Friend
Two to three posts per week is the norm. Yes, it's a grind.
Brand, Brand, Brand
Consistent topics, colors, and voice help readers identify an influencer's posts. Your banner and bio should be marketing masterpieces.
Bask in the Online Attention
The algorithm responds kindly to influencers who hit "reply" to comments, ultimately fueling more visibility for those posts.
Critics of LinkedIn compare it to a dating site: Users feel like they’re one click away from Bill Gates (37 million followers) or Sir Richard Branson (18.7 million), or at least one “Easy Apply” away from the job of their dreams. The reality is more mundane: Recruiters use LinkedIn to filter candidates for basic job history and skills, while professionals use the site as a live résumé that sometimes spouts opinions. “For board candidates, I suggest that they keep their feeds active with their followers,” says David Vied, global sector leader for the Medical Devices and Diagnostics practice at Korn Ferry. “I don’t judge what people post—but when it’s narcissistic and self-serving and not professional, you can’t look away.”
LinkedIn has long realized the value of users who can’t look away, whether the poster is famous, engaging, or controversial. In 2012, LinkedIn began designating top thought leaders in their industries as official LinkedIn Influencers. These leaders are now the platform’s cornerstone. Dozens of LinkedIn initiatives and algorithms may have come and gone, but the influencers program has remained, because it spurs a stream of unique content, which attracts readers ranging from business students to C-suite executives.
But here’s where it gets weird. Initially, LinkedIn Influencers were the cream of international business and power—everyone from Michael Bloomberg to Meg Whitman to Tony Hsieh to David Cameron (remember, the former prime minister of the UK). In 2017, around the time that the word “influencer” began to conjure sweatpants-clad teenagers demonstrating makeup techniques online, the program merged with another LinkedIn initiative called Top Voices. Today, Bill Gates is still a Top Voices pick. But so are many hundreds of people you’ve never heard of. Some have follower numbers in the low thousands, others in the millions; in both cases, their bios often may skip important details such as their job and/or
educational histories.
LinkedIn says that the program recognizes posters who “consistently demonstrate expertise and leadership in their respective fields in ways that educate, inspire, and inform the larger community.” Of course, each influencer on the site has their own origin story.
