by Kimberly A. Whitler, Forbes

2017 is expected to be the year that influencers of the C-suite matter. Josh Steimle, author and CMO, predicted that companies will turn to popular business authors, speakers, podcasters, and executives who have built large and engaged followings and offer them freebies to hawk everything from invoicing software to consulting services (see prediction here).

So who are the top influencers of CMOs? To find out, I turned to Leadtail, a leading social media insights research company, who tracks over 1,300 North American CMOs who are active on Twitter and analyzed over 680,000 tweets published by these CMOs during calendar year 2016. The analysis included unique hashtags, links shared, mentions, replies, and retweets. The following includes: 1) the list of top influencers, 2) the hot topics CMOs are talking about, and 3) predictions from some of the influencers regarding the topics CMOs will be most interested in 2017.

The Top 20 Influencers Of CMOs

The top influencers of CMOs are a combination of C-level executives, authors, and professional speakers. The methods used to create impact vary across the influencers. As Carter Hostelley, CEO of Leadtail indicates, there are four general paths that top influencers use: 1) leverage insight gained from their position (e.g., @BrianSolis is a principal analyst at a Prophet company), 2) leverage domain expertise about a specific topic (e.g., @chiefmartec tweets extensively about MarTech), 3) create and curate compelling content (@JayBaer who writes about CMO-related issues), and 4) build influence through engaging everyone (@TedRubin and @TamaraMcCleary). Typically, the most influential use some combination of these different approaches.