The Top 100 Content Marketers To Follow Right Now

Contents

The top 100 content marketing influencers to follow right now

Methodology

What does the typical content marketing influencer look like?

What do the top 10 content marketing influencers look like?

What the top 10 influencers do to dominate (quotes included!)

The top 100 content marketing influencers to follow right now

Methodology 

Our list of the top 100 content marketing influencers is taken from BuzzSumo’s Twitter Influencer tool.

To create it, we looked into:

• The topics listed in the bio of the influencer

• The topics shared on their Twitter feeds

This gave us a list of the top influencers sorted by “Relevance” 

Aside from what’s in the search, “Relevancy” is determined by a number of different components, including:

• Average retweets
• Reply ratio
• Verified status
• The number of times an influencer appears in a Twitter list relevant to the topic

While relevancy is an effective way to organize the dataset, we wanted to give even greater weighting to the metrics that are most critical to engagement.

So, we exported our list, and took the following steps:

• We omitted companies
• We removed non-English language profiles
• We removed accounts that hadn’t been active this year
• And finally we did a three-way-sort of the most relevant influencers, by:

- Average retweets

- Reply ratio

- Follower count

Why these metrics, you ask?

Average retweets are how often an influencer’s posts are retweeted by their audience on average.

It means their audience cares enough to share their wisdom with their own community.

Reply ratio is the percentage of the influencer's Tweets that are replies to their audience. 

This shows that the influencer is not just posting into the void, but actively engaging with their community.

Follower count is probably the least indicative of engagement out of all three metrics. 

After all, you could have tens of thousands of followers, but have an average retweet count of zilch 👎

But we’ve decided to include it, because it’s still a vote of confidence for an influencer, and gives us an idea of their overall reach.

What does the typical content marketing influencer look like?

We put the top 100 content marketing influencers under the microscope.

So if you’re in looking to build your profile on Twitter, consider these some of your KPIs 🤓

The typical content marketing influencer...

• Earns 0.5 retweets for every post
• Dedicates 37% of their tweets to replies
• Has nearly 4x more followers (14K) than “followees” (3.7K). 
• Has a domain authority of 39 (based on the link in their bio)
• Is verified 36% of the time

It’s all in the conversation

Half a retweet isn’t a significant amount of engagement.

In fact, when you consider that the top 100 PR influencers earned one full retweet per post, it seems comparatively low.

But if you’re looking to muscle in on the top 100 and your retweets are low, don’t panic. 

There's something else you can do to boost your profile. 

Over a third of all content marketers’ tweets are replies. 

They reply 27% more than they retweet, and 5% more than they share URLs on Twitter.

What that means is they dedicate their time on Twitter to active discussion and engagement.

And the content marketer is in fact 7% more likely to reply than the PR influencer (37% vs 30%).

What do the top 10 content marketing influencers look like?

1. Brian Dean
2. Rand Fishkin
3. Ross Simmonds
4. Ann Handley
5. Kaleigh Moore
6. Tim Soulo
7. Andy Crestodina
8. Brian Clark
9. Ross Hudgens
10. Melanie Delziel

When you hone in on the top 10 content marketing influencers, engagement ramps up big time.

It’s undeniable that these content marketers know how to captivate their audience.

Let’s look at the figures.

The “pro” content marketing influencers...

• Earn 5.3 retweets for every post
• Dedicate 59% of their tweets to replies
• Have nearly 40x more followers (35K) than “followees” (873)
• Have a domain authority of 60 (based on the link in their bio)
• Are verified 70% of the time

It’s “social” media for a reason

The difference between the top 10, and the top 100 is vast.

They are 10x more likely to get a retweet than a standard content marketing influencer!

This means they distribute high value, resonant content that their audience is compelled to share.

But the thing we found most astonishing was that these influencers dedicated more than half of their activity to interacting with their audience on Twitter.

More than half! Let that sink in.

The learning here? If you want to become a content marketing thought leader on social media, you have to put the time and effort into being… social 🤯

Answer questions, start discussions – even have a chat beyond the realms of content! (it is allowed)

These “pro” influencers have all built engaged communities rather than passive audiences.

They give back more than they take, and respond to others far more than a non-influencer would.

A zero tolerance policy for content spam

Another thing to note here is that these influencers spend even less time than the top 100 sharing URLs (7% less) and retweeting content (3% less).

That may seem a bit odd.

Surely if they share less, they’d see less engagement?

Well, not quite. 

What this really means is that the top 10 have zero tolerance for content spam. 

Unlike many on Twitter, they won’t clog up your newsfeed with links to their own content. 

You’ll never see them distributing automated RSS feed blogs, complete with aesthetically displeasing stock images, and no real information to entice you to click.

What they’ll do instead is craft considered and insight-driven posts that resonate with their audience.

Whether it’s through advice, actionable tips, or content marketing observations, these posts will either inspire or empower their audience.

Ross Simmonds’ pinned tweet is actually all about his Twitter philosophy, and Kaleigh Moore has written a whole guide on her strategy.

It’s a one horse race 

As we saw, there is a pretty big discrepancy between the top 10 and the top 100. 

It seems engagement and influence in content marketing is dominated by a few key voices.

Or maybe… just the one.

Diving into the data, the #1 content marketer, Brian Dean, has an average retweet count of 64!

That is 128x the average content marketing influencer, and 5x higher than influencer #2!

He's also nearly twice as likely to reply if you @ him – which is all the more impressive when you consider that he has 8x more followers than the top 100.

What the top 10 influencers do to dominate

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