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"LinkedIn is rolling out a couple new tools to make it easier for users to find celebrities, business leaders and personalities to follow from the social network's roster of about 150 \"thought leaders.\"\nLast month, LinkedIn announced a new follow feature for a select group of influencers, including big names like Virgin CEO Richard Branson, author Tony Robbins, President Obama and Mashable\u00A0CEO and founder Pete Cashmore. Since then, these influencers have shared 850 posts ranging from author Gretchen Rubin's piece about the most dangerous form of procrastination\u00A0to Branson musing about why more business leaders aren't online.\nThe new tools, which LinkedIn announced in a blog post Thursday, include a leaderboard that displays the total number of followers for each influencer in one place ,as well as options to sort each of the thought leaders alphabetically and by who has posted most recently. LinkedIn will also begin offering users customized suggestions for influencers they might want to follow, based on their interests. In this way, LinkedIn hopes to make it easier for users to discover and follow influencers.\nTo date, the LinkedIn leaderboard shows that Richard Branson is by far the most followed of the influencers, with nearly 700,000 followers. President Obama is a distant second with nearly 400,000 followers and his Republican opponent for president Mitt Romney has about half that many, making him the fourth most followed.\nAll in all, LinkedIn says its 150 infuencers have received a total of four million follows since the feature launched, which isn't bad for one month, but when you consider that LinkedIn has 175 million members, there's still plenty of room to grow.\u00A0Clearly that's the goal of these updates.\nLinkedIn also announced that it has added a few influencers to the group, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian,\u00A0Box CEO Aaron Levie and Brad Feld, managing director of the Foundry Group.\nBy building on this network of influencers, LinkedIn simultaneously encourages big name personalities to become more active on the social network and potentially boosts engagement between users overall.\nImage courtesy of LinkedIn"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/11/01/linkedin-influencers-update/>