• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, June 19, 2014

Forbes, the World Economic Forum and Inc. Magazine top the list of the 10 most influential brands on LinkedIn, according to the professional networking site.

The ranking is derived from a content marketing score created by LinkedIn, which measures the effectiveness of a company’s content marketing efforts through their activity on the social network.

Specifically, the score tracks user engagement with paid and unpaid marketing tools on LinkedIn, including sponsored updates, company pages, LinkedIn groups, employee updates and Influencer posts. LinkedIn said a score can be taken at any point through a company’s campaign and ranked against those of other brands.

Of the top 10 brands, half were publishers. Along with Forbes and Inc., the list includes The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Mashable. Tech companies make up the balance of the list, with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Salesforce.com.

Given LinkedIn’s focus on a professional audience, the preponderance of business publishers and major tech firms  isn’t surprising. The only possible outlier is Mashable, which doesn’t have the same pedigree or business focus as the other publishers. Content marketing king Buzzfeed apparently hasn’t broken through yet.

LinkedIn said the top brands had three practices in common: They continue to update users on industry news, release new and engaging content tailored to specific audiences and “insert themselves into conversations audiences care about.”

LinkedIn has made content marketing a key part of its growth strategy to help bolster engagement on a site where users have tended not to spend as much time as on broader social networks like Facebook. Marketing options like Sponsored updates—the in-stream native ad unit LinkedIn launched last year also directly drives revenue.

In the first quarter, sponsored updates made up 19% of LinkedIn’s ad revenue, up from 13% in the fourth quarter of 2013. LinkedIn said almost half of the top 10 brands used sponsored updates, but that it doesn’t give more weight to engagement from one type of marketing tactic over another when scoring brands.

LinkedIn separately on Thursday introduced a new job search app for the iPhone, which lets users filter opening based on categories such as title, location and industry, as well as suggesting jobs based on prior searches. More than 40% of users are already using mobile to look at jobs on LinkedIn, the company said.