Is LinkedIn Top Voice Badge Worth it?

my honest opinion after 30 days, and how to earn it…

You must have seen the golden community voice badge here and there on LinkedIn if you use the platform. I was curious about what the deal is about them; if they actually make any difference,

so I set myself on a mission to try it out,

I worked my way to earn the Top Machine Learning Voice badge by contributing to enough collaborative articles.

The internet was surprisingly unhelpful when I tried to find some info on these badges and what they’re all about, so I decided to write an article answering some common questions and giving my honest opinion about these badges. I will cover:

💡 What is the Top Voice Badge?

LinkedIn has introduced two types of badges, the Top Voice (blue badge) and the Community Top Voice (golden badge) to differentiate industry leaders and experts.

• Top Voice: the blue badge awarded by LinkedIn to a limited number of distinguished industry leaders and voices. I don’t think there’s someone who actually “earned” it purposefully. Your best bet to be rewarded these blue beasts is to be an avid content creator with a considerable number of followers.

• Community Top Voice: every user has a chance to earn these badges by contributing to several collaborative articles. Unlike the blue badge, the golden badge is earned and you don’t need a massive follower count, though it sure helps.

The focus of my article is the Community Top Voice.

📝 How to Earn the Gold Badge?

The Golden Badge is all about collaborative articles. To enter the game you must contribute to at least five articles. I initially thought five is enough, but it’s just the beginning.

You will only get a badge if you’re in the top 5% of the contributors.

Collaborative Article.

So you could say that earning the badge is a competitive endeavor.

The Community Top Voice badge program is invitation-only, meaning that you have to be eligible. To check whether or not you are eligible, check out any collaborative article on the subject of your expertise. For example, here is the list of articles on Machine Learning.

At the top of the article, if you see a start a contribution or similar button, you’re good to go.

If you’re invited to the program, you will see the “start a contribution” button.

What if I Am Not Invited?

If you’re not yet eligible to contribute to LinkedIn articles, here are two things that help:

• start creating content about your field, and optimize your profile and skills to emphasize your field of expertise. Follow and interact with other field experts.

• to do this fast, react to some of the contributions made to the collaborative articles.

Select a Topic Wisely

The next step is to choose a niche. I started contributing to Artificial Intelligence articles. I made many contributions but was stuck between the top 7% and 10% of contributors.

List of topcis.

I then realized this was due to the high competition in this topic.

Many people contributed to Artificial Intelligence, even those who were not technical experts.

So I pivoted to another topic with less competition but more technicality that was close to my expertise: Machine Learning.

It was a wise choice that paved my way.

Your field of work may include various overlapping topics, such as Programming, Data Science, Machine Learning, or Artificial Intelligence. But you must be aware that some of these topics are just harder to excel at.

As a rule of thumb, choose the topics that are more technical and less general.

Is LinkedIn Top Voice Badge Worth it?

It’s not an easy question to answer. There are no particular control variables to show how your profile performs before vs. after earning a badge.

Here are some stats for perspective:

my impression plot over the last 90 days.

I earned my badge sometime in August, before the big spike you see above. The spike happened when one of my posts went viral on the platform (with 2300 reactions.) In hindsight, I don’t think my badge had anything to do with the post going viral. I had many other posts performing the same as before.

It’s important to keep in mind where your badge IS SHOWN and where NOT:

• the badge is shown on your profile page.

• the badge is shown in the collaborative articles beside your name, making your contributions more distinguished.

• the badge is not shown on your posts.

So it’s safe to hypothesize that a community voice badge has absolutely no effect on your posts, as nobody can see you have one without visiting your profile.

It could be effective for those who visit your profile, increasing your visitor-to-follower conversion rate.

It can also be helpful if you take collaborative articles seriously, as you can earn followers by writing more contributions.

my followers plot over the last 90 days.

Above, you can also see my follower count’s plot. The two big spikes were before I earned my badge. So you can clearly see the badge has not automatically increased my follower count either.

Honestly, here’s my thought…

I’m not entirely sure the Golden Badge is that effective. It could establish a sort of expertise and authority for those who visit your profile,

but does it REALLY mean anything?

It’s up to you to decide. I mean, you basically earn a badge by making many contributions. They don’t even need to be the best. You’re not earning a badge by building projects, doing Leetcode, publishing research, or any other practical means or standards.

How the badge is shown on your profile.

In my very personal opinion, and as someone who has earned the badge, I don’t think it really establishes proof of your expertise.

Maybe you come to the same conclusion once you see what I have seen in the collaborative articles: cheesy contributions, or answers that are obviously AI-generated. This is something you want to absolutely avoid.

AI-generated content, while being obvious to the eyes of the readers, is also likely to contain hallucinations and false information.

To make your contributions stand out, genuinely post authentic and original contributions.

I also think that many of the questions or topics that are chosen for these collaborative articles are too generic and not specific to that subject.

Having a Badge is Better than Not

Putting the time and energy into earning the community voice badge is undoubtedly better than doing absolutely nothing. Your subject of expertise might not even require you to put in that much time to earn a badge either. So there’s hardly any reason not to do it.

On the plus side, you develop some writing and communication skills by contributing to the collaborative articles. There are also things to learn about the contribution of experts.

So would I earn the badge again if I could? Yes! As long as it doesn’t require me to chunk out a big portion of my time, I don’t see why not.

Does it have a considerable effect on your profile performance? Not really!

At the end of the day, it all comes down to your preference and what you’re trying to get out of the platform. In my experience, it pays much more to create authentic content that adds value to an audience, whether by posts or collaborative articles.