top 100 content marketers

In today’s report, we want to give you a list of outstanding content marketers, doing real and wonderful things in our industry. And to start, perhaps we should define what an “influencer” really means. These days, people aren’t putting their trust in one-off endorsements from celebrities or TV personalities. Instead, they’re choosing to trust people they can actually interact with, learn from, and admire: up close, and personal. And social media has made this all possible. Our favorite people are right there, within reach. Those people you follow, look up to, and know from your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feeds have major clout. Their sheer gravitas is enough to move people to act. That’s huge, and that’s the basis of influencer marketing. It’s more relevant than ever in 2018, as consumer preferences move farther and farther away from traditional ads (particularly Generation Z). Today’s influencer types include social media experts, popular YouTube users, bloggers, and celebrities (Sprout Social). Before we get into our official Top 100 Content Marketer influencer list, let’s discuss the concepts on which we actually built the list. (Want to save a copy of the infographic to read later? Download here.) How Did We Build the List of Top 100 Content Marketers? Our gross data points for this list were gathered on BuzzSumo, one of my favorite content intelligence tools. We combined both the Top Authors and Top Influencers for “content marketing,” cross-examined the results on both lists, and merged them into one, final list. We cleaned it up by removing accounts that had been suspended, had absolutely nothing to do with content marketing, or hadn’t tweeted about it in 5+ months. The top 100 accounts in both Authors and Influencers for “content marketing,” with a clear direct focus on content marketing and digital/inbound marketing, and an active role in the content marketing field (CEO, VP, Director, Marketer) were included. Fairness was important to us. We included teams and single marketers (a good balance of both women and men). Both teams and their team members had the opportunity to make the list. So, that’s why you’ll see both @Hubspot and a couple Hubspot writers/marketers on the list. We think that industry teams that work hard as a whole, as well as the individual people that really get behind moving content marketing inside the team, both deserve recognition. Our key goal with this year’s “The Top 100 Content Marketers” was to create a current, accurate, and real content marketing influencer list. Since the Twitter purge the week of July 9, which caused millions and millions of accounts on Twitter to be deleted and removed from the platform, it’s becoming more relevant and necessary than ever to maintain a real presence on social media. Not a presence built by bots, fake followers, and an overnight rush of success. But a real, humanly-built, humanly-connected presence. Over 2.5 months of work and 50-70 hours of team work has gone into the research and final list of 100. I worked on the final report-gathering research and work, the team at BuzzSumo helped me along the way (thanks, Susan Moeller!), and our team copywriters and editors helped me proof the list for any spam, as well as put all the bios together. Then, our editors proofread the copy while our designer put together a beautiful infographic and PDF. This was quite the project! [bctt tweet=”Fairness to both teams and individual marketers, as well as looking for leaders that have been recently active in content marketing, was important in building our #Top100ContentMarketers report. @JuliaEMcCoy” username=”ExpWriters”] How Does BuzzSumo Populate Their “Search Influencers” Feature? BuzzSumo combines and measures a lot of different data points to help you find influencers in an industry based on their Twitter profiles. Metrics that weigh into top-ranked include page authority, domain authority, total # of followers, real engagement: their retweet ratio, and more. The most important data point, however, is one BuzzSumo keeps under wraps: Relevancy. According to Susan, the relevancy factor measures how accurately a Twitter influencer matches the user search. For example, if I search for influencers using the keyword “content marketing,” BuzzSumo returns a list based on their own relevancy score for those results. We can surmise that this score depends on weighing all the factors together (total followers, domain authority, etc.) and ranking the results accordingly. However, there are other, proprietary factors involved that BuzzSumo won’t disclose. In other words, they use a “secret sauce” to return relevant influencers during a search. And, this proprietary factor is what makes their tool so special. Personally, in the last seven years of doing content marketing full time I’ve tried dozens of other content analysis-based tools, and I consistently find BuzzSumo the most accurate (accurate on share counts, followers, and minimal spam). Without further ado, we present The Top 100 Content Marketers for 2018. You can expand and scroll through the SlideShare embedded below, or download as a PDF and save for later. The Top 100 Content Marketers (Real Industry Influencers) Download as a PDF and save for later. The Top 100 Content Marketers 2018 (Express Writers & BuzzSumo) from Julia McCoy The Top 100 Content Marketers (Real Industry Influencers) Click on the @handles in the headers to open each profile in a new tab and follow on Twitter. 1.    Content Marketing Institute – @CMIContent CMI is one of the top authorities in the industry. Their conferences, events, courses, and blog all highlight advice from experts, down-to-earth teaching, and a focus on advancing content marketing. 2.    Ann Handley – @MarketingProfs Not only is Ann Handley the brains behind Marketing Profs – she’s also a pioneer of digital marketing, an inspiring speaker, and a best-selling author (Everybody Writes and Content Rules). 3.    Joe Pulizzi – @JoePulizzi Another major name in the industry, Joe Pulizzi is the founder of CMI and a content marketing movement leader. He’s a speaker, an entrepreneur, and has authored go-to books like Epic Content Marketing, Content Inc., and Killing Marketing. 4.    Lilach Bullock – @lilachbullock Lilach Bullock is a social media and lead generation machine. She shares her knowledge through … Read more