We haven’t looked at LinkedIn’s top publishers since January, so we thought it was time to check in again and see how publishers are doing at getting their stories shared on the world’s biggest professional social network. Here’s the top ten for May:

Although the order of the biggest publishers has stayed somewhat similar since January, the total volume of shares has shot up dramatically. In January, only the top three sites had over 100,000 monthly shares. In May, 15 sites hit that target, with four over 200,000 and leaders Forbes closing on half a million.

Here’s a chart showing the jump in shares for each of last month’s top ten publishers:

Forbes maintain an impressive lead, while Business Insider overtook Mashable to take third spot, one behind the New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal has made significant strides on the network, adding close to an extra 100,000 shares to come in at number 6. LinkedIn is a platform that WSJ’s content seems well suited to, and it’s interesting to see how they’ve managed to capitalise on that so far this year.

Inc.com is a newcomer to the top ten. The Harvard Business Review dropped out of the top ten, despite adding about 40,000 shares to its content.

As usual, some of the sites doing well on LinkedIn don’t feature at the top ofthe Facebook charts at all. Viral super-sites such as Upworthy, BuzzFeed and political sites like the Blaze and Think Progress are nowhere to be seen in the top 20, while specialist sites such as TechCrunch and Fast Company make appearances.

The upward trend is much in line with what we’ve seen on Facebook and Twitter over the last few months. One big feature that LinkedIn unveiled since we last looked at their sharing figures was the roll-out of blogging functionality for all users. The roll-out has been slow in coming, but the idea of LinkedIn as a publisher in the vein of Medium is an intriguing one. LinkedIn blog posts from influencers like Bill Gates and David Cameron already attract significant sharing activity on the platform, so extending the feature to all (including publishers) should have a buoyant impact on overall shares.

Check out the top 20 publishers and their stats below. We’ll be back with May’s biggest Twitter publishers and more social data insights on the blog soon, so don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates.

Also: Be sure to check out our brand new ‘people powered news’ app, which we just launched this week for Android and iOS. It’s completely free.

How do we know all this stuff?

We compiled our data using Spike, which tracks the content that people are sharing and engaging with in real time. It’s used by some of the world’s leading digital newsrooms, and there’s a free trial for new users.

Data is for English language publishers only, for content published during May. If you have any questions about our coverage, please email us on[email protected].