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Who Are The Top 10 Women Social Media Influencers?

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A couple of weeks back I asked who are the top ten social media influencers and shared a list that I drew up using PeekYou's analytics tools. Individual influencers have extraordinary reach which is well worth documenting.  Who are the leading women influencers, though? There's a provisional list below.

The previous post generated some useful feedback, and a few new names.

There were objections too - that numbers don't take account of quality and that PeekYou's tools might be limited. Both those objections are valid to a point. I'm open to incorporating other tools  but any tool is limited and numbers have a value if we're careful about how we interpret them.

So today I'm asking the question specifically about women social media influencers and hoping to get some input. Who are the leading women influencers in social media and marketing?

A few caveats:

This is not a Forbes list, which are definitive in their fields. It is not a definitive guide. It is my list and my question - are there more and different people to go on here?

Why should we care about a top ten?

Some people might find it useful to have benchmarks. Note how the leading woman, Ann Handley has over 3x the social pull of the 10th on this list, Vicki Flaugher. Clearly there are benchmarks here that people can use to guide their own online marketing.

What is social pull?

It's a measure of your reach down into the second degree of separation, all the people active on the web who you connect with and who connect with them, across different networks.

Won't these lists  change over time?

They seem to change on a weekly basis. People's networks grow and shrink faster than we might think and I will come back to that. The top ten list I published two weeks ago is already under revision.

Does it cover all networks?

It's weak on Google + influencers. As of right now the tool does not reflect the growing influence of people within the Google + community.

So caveats aside here is my top ten. I am creating a top 50 (male/female) which I'm using for a study that I'm doing for the folks over at Global Dawn on what influencers actually say. More of that in January.

The score is social pull, which is expressed as a multiple of the average Twitter users pull down to the second degree of seperation. So Ann Handley has 2962 x the pull of the average Twitter user.

1. Ann Handley , Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs 2962

2. Liz Strauss CEO and founder of SOBCon 1827

3. Mari Smith Facebook marketing expert 1806

4. Pam Moore Zoom Factor, brand, reputation management 1583

5. Eve Mayer Orbsurn LinkedIn expert 1405

6. Viveka Von Rosen LinkedIn expert 1123

7. Marsha Collier eBay marketing expert 1063

8. Michele Smorgon online brand and reputation management 924

9. Kristi Hines freelance writer and online marketing consultant 874

10. Vicki Flaugher runs Smart Woman Guides 849

You might argue that some of these influencers are narrow in the sense that their focus is on LinkedIn or eBay rather than on social media marketing in general. They can't be leading in social media. But there is a lesson there also. People with larger influence are tending towards specialisation, perhaps as a way of competing with longer established influencers.

It's the spread between 1 and 10 though that is most striking 2962: 849. In the mixed top ten the spread is less than half. That might mean there's still a lot of upside for women who can strategise their network building effectively.

Another notable feature not shown in the table is that most women write for a male audience as much as they do for a female - or rather their identifiable male audiences are almost all slightly larger than their female.

Finally what helps a top influencer?

Is it highly visible activity like number of tweets? Liz Strauss - in second position here - tweets often. On average about 1300 tweets a month over a near five year period. Ann Handley, top position here, tweets much less - about 550 a month over a slightly shorter period.  Mari Smith is up there near to Liz, 1150 per month.

These influencers have been active for a relatively long time but clearly Twitter activity alone doesn't determine the number of second-degree followers that they have acquired, even though Twitter has helped them to create large networks. So what does?

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

You might also like this piece on how to become a social media influencer - some small steps for beginners