How I Got my LinkedIn Top Voice Badge
I started my journey on LinkedIn around 1 year ago, posting regularly about the topics I love, mainly Data & AI.
During the last year, I kept posting consistently despite a demanding job. I posted on average once per week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But I kept momentum and the followers number kept growing (Thank You!). This is much less than “real content creators” who will generally post at much higher frequency, typically 4 or 5 times per week.
Even if I do not consider myself as “Content Creator”, I actually write articles and posts and engage with the community in many ways. This helps me stay up-to-date, learn and also confront my views.
A couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised by an invitation from LinkedIn Community. This is what I received :
Now, I do not know how I managed to get this email. I didn’t interact directly with LinkedIn Community managers nor made a specific request or application, but I believe some algorithm picked my profile : it might be related to the posts I have shared, the articles I have written, to my audience, or a combination of that, but I was very excited to get this “recognition” — even if, realistically, it is algorithmic based.
From the articles suggested by the message I received, I didn’t feel comfortable commenting the first, but the second on Data Architecture, was much more “my plate”. So I started looking for the article under that topic and collaborating.
I regularly write about Data Architecture, and it is a true passion to me. I already published a book about Data Integration as well as a Udemy Course. So, writing about it felt legitimate and fun!
The articles suggested by LinkedIn are AI generated. Their quality is average, sometimes more, sometimes less. The content is “conventional”, shares mainly “standard knowledge”. However, the contributions of the experts (me included I hope) added real value to it, by including critical views, interesting opinions, and real life stories.
I picked the LinkedIn Collaborative Articles I liked, and started working on them on a Saturday sleepless night. Here are some examples — Feel free to react and share your views :
What are your best practices for data architecture?
- Follow data quality and governance principles
- Define business objectives and requirements
- Here’s what else to consider
What criteria are used to select data integration tools and platforms?
How can you implement data warehousing best practices across domains and platforms?
How can you improve data culture and literacy with data visualization?
What is the best way to translate business user needs into data warehouse requirements?
How does metadata management affect data quality?
What are the best ways to measure the ROI of a data warehouse project?
During the process, I also discovered that such collaborations can help get the Community “Top Voice Badge”, which honestly added to my motivation.
I kept collaborating on the articles — sometimes in a very short format — but what I wrote was genuine and authentic contributions, and I enjoyed the process.
Here is an example of a contribution to these articles:
And a couple of days later, … TADA !!!
The badge should be active for around 60 days. Not sure afterwards how to ensure keeping it. LinkedIn states that if the badge holder keeps collaborating, they should be able to keep it, but of course, LinkedIn keeps “discretion” on the exact criteria.
An email came to confirm this:
The badge also mentions the skill or topic for which you are a Top Voice, in my case it is “Data Architecture”, but hundreds of topics are listed, so look for yours if you are interested! It is also possible to collect multiple badges. I have only one for now, and that should be sufficient for me.
And just for sake of clarity, this is the Community Top Voice Badge, which is different from LinkedIn Top Voice, that is still for now an Invitation Only program.
Finally, and to set expectations on this, I got almost 0 followers related to the badge. So it does not really allow to grow your audience. The contributions however might bring more followers, but I didn’t analyse the data for now.
Update (Nov. 2023): I continued contributing to other topics, including Data Management. I contributed to around 5 articles, but the contributions were of high quality, and was awarded a second badge, on Data Management!
Update (Jan. 2024): The Data Architecture badge (the first one I received in October), was turned off by LinkedIn around early January — so almost 3 months after it was visible on my profile. LinkedIn mentions that they keep badges for 60 days and reassess after the 60 days, so here it stayed for almost 90 days. For now I only kept the Data Management badge!
Thank you for reading! Have you ever tried hitting the clap button here on Medium more than once to see what happens?
Feel free to share your thoughts, comments and feedback! You can also follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.