LinkedIn is the largest social media platform for business professionals. A LinkedIn influencer is a thought leader that has an enormous following on the platform.

The question is whether or not LinkedIn pays its influencers or not.

Everyone knows how influential LinkedIn is. The network is growing at a tremendous pace.

It was created by networking entrepreneur Reid Hoffman.

In the past few years, LinkedIn has grown so big that it now stands as the world’s largest social network for business professionals.

Hoffman created LinkedIn so that professionals can easily communicate and get access to other professionals. That being said, LinkedIn has become the main social media site for professionals in the world.

If LinkedIn influencers are so influential and do so much to make LinkedIn such an incredible platform for business professionals, how come there are so few successful influencers that get paid by LinkedIn to advertise and promote the platform?

In fact, you might be wondering why many successful people who are or were on the board at LinkedIn aren’t able to pull in a living from it.

Is it because of the lack of marketing or influencer talent on LinkedIn? Or is it that they aren’t being paid by LinkedIn or even encouraged to push their LinkedIn-related brands on the platform?

Looking at LinkedIn’s yearly advertiser earnings, you’d think that many influencers make money from the platform. LinkedIn pays thousands of dollars to the world’s top influencers.

Wego Analytics, however, found that only a handful of influencers are truly making money from the platform.

Wego Analytics analyzed the earnings of all the top LinkedIn influencers in the world. These are people that were on the board of directors for LinkedIn, the most influential executives at LinkedIn, and the people that regularly write blog posts on LinkedIn that are read by thousands of people.

In all, we analyzed 70 influencers, ranging in a wide range of professions.

LinkedIn influencers get paid – maybe!

The majority of top influencers are worth their weight in gold to LinkedIn. But they’re not necessarily being paid by LinkedIn.

In fact, we found that just a third of LinkedIn’s top influencers receive some form of payment from the platform.

In total, just over a third of LinkedIn’s top influencers got paid for advertising on the network. However, we found that a whopping 52 percent of LinkedIn’s top influencers make money from the platform in other ways. These include:

• Authored blogs
• Career coaching
• Inspiring YouTube videos
• Having your brand promoted on LinkedIn's InMail messaging
• Short course sales
• Career advice books

Why there are few successful influencers on LinkedIn

So, where are all the top LinkedIn influencers?

There are about 60,000 top influencers that write articles for LinkedIn. The network has more than 450 million monthly active users.

And that number is growing.

Clearly, a lot of people are writing about topics that are relevant to their business, but the talent pool for influencers is limited. It’s not because the platform doesn’t have enough talented writers and marketers.

In fact, Wego found that LinkedIn has the second-most prolific group of writers, behind only Blogger.

LinkedIn does not pay its top influencers. However, the company is heavily promoting influencers by paying a few to put their content out there.

As Wego found, a small percentage of LinkedIn’s top influencers are paid by the platform.

Wego found that just 10 percent of the top influencers are paid by LinkedIn.

Wego analyzed the earnings of the 50 most-successful influencers on LinkedIn. These are the LinkedIn users that regularly write blog posts, have published a book, or have started their own company or business that is relevant to LinkedIn users.

While Wego found that just about all of the influencers are worth their weight in gold to LinkedIn, only about 10 percent of them are paid.

LinkedIn recommends the wrong bloggers

LinkedIn’s third-party vendor, Wego Analytics, analyzed the earnings of all of the top 50 influencers in the world. These are the individuals who are on the LinkedIn boards and who regularly write articles, blog posts, or have founded or run a company that is relevant to LinkedIn users.

These influencers are also people that LinkedIn recommends to its members as the best people to follow on LinkedIn.

What Wegotev found is that LinkedIn recommends to its members the wrong people for its top influencers. Instead of the most successful, talented, and influential LinkedIn users in the world, LinkedIn gives the power to influencers who it knows its members will like.

Wego found that 58 percent of the top 50 influencers aren’t even active on the platform anymore. The majority have been inactive for more than a year.

Why don’t these powerful influencers write or blog?

When we interviewed each influencer, the first reason for not writing or posting was that they were more focused on their career or running their business. The second reason was that they simply don’t see an opportunity to monetize their content.

LinkedIn claims it pays around 20 cents per engagement. That’s a pittance compared to what they could be paying.

In fact, Wego found that LinkedIn is losing out on approximately $200,000 in marketing value.

How to promote your brand on LinkedIn

For marketers, LinkedIn is the second most important social network, after Facebook, for promoting your brand. And, based on the figures above, you’re missing out on a lot of potential revenue by not paying for a small number of top influencers.

LinkedIn is currently pushing a new direction with its influencers. But if you want to increase engagement and traffic to your site or brand, it’s time to pay the influencers.

You can do so easily by offering to pay influencers.

For example, say you are a writer who has written a book. You can offer to pay the top influencers for every like or share they generate for you.

And, you can offer to pay influencers for new followers they can receive for sharing your content or recommending it to their followers.