If you're anything like me, you've been spending more time on LinkedIn recently. And you've probably noticed the blue and gold badges that some active users have listed next to their names. These Top Voice badges signify thought leaders in a particular industry, and they're becoming a hot commodity among people who are trying to build their personal brands on LinkedIn.
Myself included. (Because who doesn't love a shiny gold star on their work?)
When I was invited to contribute to LinkedIn's collaborative articles and earn my Community Top Voice badge, I thought, "Why not?" In less than a week, I had earned my Top Social Media Voice badge. Since then, I've seen some interesting results on my LinkedIn account.
In this article, I'm going to walk you through some frequently asked questions about these badges, plus my own experience and takeaways from the process. I'll cover:
LinkedIn’s Top Voice (blue badge) and Community Top Voice (gold badge) programs are built to distinguish skilled practitioners and thought leaders in a particular industry. Unlike verification badges on Meta or X (Twitter), you can’t pay for LinkedIn badges. Instead, they’re doled out based on your knowledge, skills, expertise, and experience.
As you’re scrolling through the platform, you’ll notice there are two different types of LinkedIn Top Voice badges. One is blue, one is gold.
Here’s the difference:
Only 300 LinkedIn users are selected to become a Top Voice every year. It’s an exclusive program that’s based on a hand selection process, so there aren’t exact steps that will guarantee you a spot. However, LinkedIn Top Voices all have these traits in common:
Your best bet for becoming a Top Voice is to get really serious about your LinkedIn content strategy. Here’s what that entails:
But keep in mind that intentionally seeking a Top Voice badge may not prove particularly fruitful. Considering only .0004% of LinkedIn users get a Top Voice badge, this distinction is out of reach for most users. The good news is, any effort you put into earning this distinction means you’re building your LinkedIn presence. It will still pay off for your personal brand.
This doesn’t mean you should give up on your goal of earning a Top Voice badge — you’ll just have to go about it a different way.
Enter the gold badge, aka the Top Community Voice.
Becoming a Top Community Voice is a great way to show your expertise, build your presence, and stand out in the LinkedIn community. And it’s much easier to secure than the blue badge. Here’s how to get your Community Top Voice badge:
This is probably the hardest part of the process. Before you can start contributing to collaborative articles, you need to get invited! Here’s how to check if you have access to collaborative articles.
If you don’t see this button, you need to build up your presence a bit more. Here are a few tips and some additional context from LinkedIn:
“LinkedIn has invited a select group of experts to contribute insights within these articles. LinkedIn identifies members who are likely to be experts in a certain topic based on their work experience, skills, proficiency, and prior engagement on the platform... To be considered, you can engage with the articles by liking or reacting to them.”
Let’s break that down. On top of building a robust LinkedIn presence, there are a couple of shortcuts you can take to get invited to collaborative articles.
Once you're invited, you'll start to get notifications across the platform to contribute to different articles.
There are almost 2,400 collaborative article categories to choose from. They cover every imaginable industry and skillset, from Agroforestry to Real Estate to HTML5 to Social Media.
We’re sure you have expertise on more than one of the listed topics. For example, my personal career journey means I could probably contribute to Marketing Strategy, Marketing Management, Content Marketing, Social Media Advertising, and even Journalism.
But your goal isn’t to go broad — it’s to go deep. When you’re starting out, focus on building your authority on a single topic. If your core topic isn’t immediately clear to you, or you’re bouncing between a few options, think about your LinkedIn personal brand and/or business goals. What topic area do you most want to be affiliated with? This might depend on your desired career path or the type of clients and/or business relationships you want to attract on the platform.
It also depends on the competition. Since badges are awarded to the top 5% of contributors, it will be harder to secure a badge in a competitive topic. Don’t let that deter you from your own expertise area, but if there’s a related topic with lower competition, it might be a faster path to success. I got the Social Media badge, but I also could have gone for the Social Media Marketing or Social Media Communications badge.
You can earn multiple Community Top Voice badges, but only one appears on your LinkedIn profile. That’s why we suggest sticking to just one topic, at least in the beginning.
Now it’s time to start answering questions! Think of these as answers to FAQs — they should be quick, to the point, and easy to scan.
While there’s no need to write an essay, quality is still important. Your ranking for a topic depends in part on the engagement you receive on your answers. You’re much more likely to get engagement if you contribute content that’s thoughtful and experience-backed. People try to game the system with AI-generated answers, but you can’t fool most users with that type of low-quality content.
Now that you’re contributing to collaborative articles… when does your badge show up? LinkedIn suggests contributing to 3+ articles in a category in order to be considered in the ranking for a badge. LinkedIn says:
“To earn a badge, you’re typically in the top 5% of contributors and one of the first 2500 badge holders for a particular skill. We determine the top 5% of contributors by looking at a variety of factors, including quality, engagement, and quantity of contributions.”
Here’s what those factors mean:
Depending on the competition in the topic, three or four answers might be enough to rank. But your topic might be much more competitive. To get my Top Social Media Voice badge, I set a goal of contributing to three articles per day a couple times per week. Social Media is also a very competitive topic — just look how many contributions there are on Social Media articles vs. a less competitive category, like Trend Forecasting.
A big factor in your ranking is engagement, so if all you’re doing is answering questions without investing in other sources of content, you might not see the results you want.
Your collaborative article answers will show up in your followers’ feeds, where they can then engage. But what if you don’t have a ton of followers? You see now why it’s important to build up your LinkedIn presence outside of these articles. Expanding your overall LinkedIn follower base helps you get more engagement on your answers.
After a few weeks of consistent answering, you should be on your way to earning a badge!
Buried in the fine print is this note from LinkedIn: “The Community Voice Top Badge is active for 60 days after you earn it. LinkedIn may remove a member without notice from the Top Voices program, which includes removal of the profile badge, at its sole discretion.”
It’s hard to gauge the concrete impact of becoming a LinkedIn top voice. Here are some of the stats that I noticed after I got my gold badge:
I've also been posting more on LinkedIn this year. So while the gold badge does seem to correlate to some increased followers and impressions, it's not necessarily the sole cause for that growth.
In itself, a Top Voice badge is not a magic bullet. While it might help you build a presence on the platform, just answering questions in contributor articles is not a foolproof way to gain your followers’ trust and investment in your personal or business brand. That requires a more robust LinkedIn content strategy — one that’s tailored to your business goals.
Think of the gold badge as nice-to-have element of a successful personal brand built on:
If you have these three pillars covered, then the Community Top Voice gold badge might just take your personal brand and LinkedIn presence to the next level.