The Ten Top Technology Influencers

As technology becomes central to so many aspects of our daily lives, it’s no surprise that technology influencers have grown to be one of the biggest categories on social media. Whether it’s consumer electronics, phone technology, or advanced AI topics, there’s a tech influencer covering every aspect of the digital landscape.

While tech influencers are generally categorized as one large monolith, there are many niches within the broader tech industry. This makes their audience extremely valuable to brands and tech startups looking to get their message out in a competitive marketplace.

With the right influencers, a brand can immediately build credibility and get their product or service in front of millions of tech-savvy followers who crave to have the latest and greatest that the tech world has to offer.

In this guide, we’ll explain the nuances of tech influencer marketing and go over the top 10 tech influencers across different social media platforms and niches.

Why Partner With A Tech Influencer?

With influencer marketing, a brand partners with a specific influencer to gain access to their audience. In most industries, this is done to increase brand awareness or introduce a new product or service.

In the tech world, influencers serve a slightly different purpose. The basics are the same and brands want access to the influencer’s audience, but there’s also a detailed educational component.

Most new technology requires some type of explanation, even for savvy audiences. The technology being introduced generally does something new and the audience is looking for someone trustworthy to walk them through what exactly is different about this specific product or service.

Other industries and niches may have similar requirements for influencers, but it’s a big part of the tech influencer world and it makes trust and credibility central to the influencer’s appeal.

Besides credibility, here are some of the other useful tech influencer attributes for brands.

Product Discovery

Nearly 60% of younger customers say they have discovered new products solely on social media. Over 70% say that social media is where they primarily discover new products.

In the crowded tech marketplace with new players entering all the time, this makes tech influencers an invaluable resource. Consumers need a guide to quickly find the latest technology and how it can benefit them.

Influencers fill this role better than any other marketing or informational channel that’s currently available. It’s a trend that is still growing and there’s nothing on the horizon to compete with tech influencers and the power they have to inform consumers of new products.

One aspect brands need to be aware of is which platforms specific customers prefer for discovering products. Depending on your core customer and demographic specifics, they may prefer shorter-form platforms like Instagram or longer-form content like that found on YouTube.

This generally breaks down by age and the specific technology niche, so it’s important to conduct your customer research before deciding on which tech influencers to partner with.

Product Research

In the tech industry, it’s common for consumers to perform more thorough research than in many other niches where purchases can be more impulsive. Tech consumers generally like to look at more information about a product before deciding on buying.

This is where tech influencers can be valuable resources for brands in competitive or higher-priced industries where consumers are searching for valuable and trustworthy information about a specific product.

This is different from product discovery and consumers in this category already know which brands and products they’re interested in. They instead want a trusted source to give them more in-depth knowledge before making a decision.

This requires more detailed partnerships with influencers and will involve product reviews or in some cases, even traveling to the facility where the brand tests or builds products. 

Credibility

For startups, credibility is a huge factor that can be a make-or-break attribute. Consumers are well aware of new tech brands that make huge promises, garner attention, but then don’t deliver. In the industry, this is often referred to as “vaporware”. A term first used to describe software that is never delivered, but now is used for hardware products as well.

Tech influencers can provide instant credibility for startups looking to break into a space and create a sense of buzz and confidence about their offerings.

Established tech influencers are very aware of the role they play and are not afraid to be critical of some of the most powerful tech brands and their products. This gives them the credibility to help newer startups gain a foothold with consumers.

Investor Relations & Funding

The power of tech influencers has grown so much in recent years that they have the ability to move financial markets and impact venture capital funding. Many tech start-ups look to the largest tech influencers to help create buzz for their upcoming projects.

Electric car company startup Rivian used traditional automotive influencers when launching their brand and building buzz. However, due to the technology in today’s electric vehicles, Rivian also turned to some of the most followed tech influencers to help build credibility for the brand.

This strategy was used both during the initial funding stages and after the company went public. This is now a common theme across a variety of tech startups that rely on tech influencers to help jump-start investor buzz and valuations.

While Rivian was a major automotive brand, much smaller tech companies used this same strategy when trying to enter a crowded market. The power of an influencer can help them cut through the noise and create brand awareness in a very short time.

Explaining The Different Types Of Tech Influencers

Tech influencers are often grouped into a monolithic category, but there are several distinct categories these influencers can fall into. There is some crossover and some influencers change categories as they grow in authority.

However, looking at each category can help you decide which type of influencer will work best with your campaign goals so you can start to narrow down your search for potential partnerships.

Tech Industry Observers

Industry observer influencers are those who focus on a specific area of tech and give updates on trends within the sector. They do sometimes crossover into product-specific content or reviews, but they generally provide overall industry news and insights.

Some of these industry observers are focused on consumer markets while others are more geared toward investors and others who want the latest insights to make better market decisions.

Partnering with industry observers is perfect for tech startups who are looking to build buzz around their upcoming product releases. Partnering with these influencers can also help with funding when startups are looking to raise capital and need media promo pieces to share in their pitch deck or other sales materials.

Choosing the right tech influencer helps to provide immediate name recognition for the audience you’re seeking to attract. These influencers tend to choose their partnerships carefully and prefer to have a good deal of autonomy on what they can say.

Brands should welcome this type of candor as it’s what allows the influencer to have so much trust with their audience. When partnering with this type of influencer, it’s critical to have your campaign goals clearly defined before searching for the right influencer.

Tech Product Reviewer

Influencers who do reviews are common in almost every niche, but tech influencers are particularly helpful for their audience. Tech products often have more features and novel aspects that need to be understood before a consumer makes their final decision.

This makes tech influencers extremely valuable for consumers during the buying process. For brands, there are also tech influencers that specialize in specific niches so you can always find an influencer that will match your desired audience and your content requirements.

In general, it’s best to try to find the most alignment with an influencer’s audience and your own when starting a review campaign. More general tech influencers still do product reviews, but they are often somewhat random and these are more useful for campaigns focused on brand awareness or product discovery options.

Contrarian Tech Views

One interesting and growing area of the tech influencer world is the rise of the contrarian technology influencer. These influencers are generally more critical of the tech industry as a whole. They often use humor and sarcasm to point out some of the hype that companies and brands often use to sell their products.

You might think that brands would not want to partner with these types of influencers, but they have extremely savvy audiences that can be perfect for the right brand. They also work well for brands that offer privacy services or other products that protect against certain downsides of a constantly connected digital world.

Finally, these contrarian influencers can work well for companies that have a rebellious or disruptive brand image.

Tech Vloggers Or Lifestyle Influencers

This category of influencers is usually made up of influencers who started out with tech reviews or other types of content and slowly transitioned into vloggers or lifestyle influencers.

These tend to be mega influencers and many are household names. They partner with some of the largest brands and can often discuss topics outside of tech.

However, there are smaller influencers in many niches that fit this model and they can provide strong partnership opportunities for the right brand.

The key to working with these influencers is to carefully vet the audiences to see where their interests truly focus. These audiences are often better for general consumer brands. If you have a product focused on a more narrow niche, these lifestyle tech influencers may not work as well and the ROI of the campaign can suffer.

Tips For Choosing And Working With Tech Influencers

Working with tech influencers is similar to working with influencers in other categories. There are a few differences though that you should be aware of to ensure you maintain targeting and your campaign is successful.

Below, we’ll go over some tips and scenarios to consider when choosing a tech influencer to partner with.

Define Your Campaign Goals

As we’ve shown with the types of tech influencers, there a many different objectives you can achieve when working on an influencer campaign in the tech world. Make sure you have set campaign goals and then use those goals as a guiding force during the rest of your campaign planning process.

A new DTC brand will have a much different campaign goal than a startup looking to build buzz among angel investors. Setting your goals as the first step makes the rest of the process fall into place much faster.

Tech Influencer Audience Alignment

The success of every influencer marketing campaign depends on proper audience alignment. This means the influencer’s audience perfectly aligns with your target customer. Part of this process is done through research and vetting the influencer’s audience to determine the demographic makeup.

Part of this process is also experience and understanding the different social media platforms, top influencers, and current trends. 

Regardless of your campaign goals, this is one area of your campaign planning that should get the most attention. Strong alignment with an influencer audience has more impact on a campaign’s success than just about any other factor.

If the alignment is wrong, it often doesn’t matter how popular the influencer is or how great your content brief is. The audience simply isn’t interested and the ROI will be lower than what you expect.

With tech influencers, you want to focus on their specific content niche and then determine what their audience looks for in the content. For example, does the audience come to hear about the latest products being released or do they come for detailed and honest reviews?

Each of these examples can be used for different campaign goals so choosing the right influencer is critical, even in the same broader niche as tech. 

For brands without this experience, hiring an experienced influencer marketing agency can be a wise move to guarantee a high ROI on your campaign.

Clearly Outlined Content Briefs

Next up is your content brief. A content brief outlines exactly what’s expected of the influencer and the specific content they’ll be creating around your campaign messaging.

Tech is unique in that there can often be difficult concepts that need to be explained to the consumer. Because of this, you want a clear brief so there’s no confusion injected into the overall messaging.

A confusing marketing message combined with complex technical details can lead to audiences tuning out because they just don’t understand what’s being sold to them.

Another thing to consider in your outline is the audience. Is the audience into consumer electronics or are they more advanced? You may need to create different content briefs for different influencers and their audiences depending on the audience’s level of technical knowledge.

In addition, you want your brief to align with the influencer’s style. This includes being flexible if the influencer wants to change any aspect of the brief. The influencer understands their audience and they want to make content that resonates and feels authentic. So if they have feedback, make sure to take it seriously.

Overall, a great content brief is often deceptively simple. On the surface, it seems like a very easy-to-understand message, but it likely took a good deal of planning, research, and editing to make the benefits of the product shine through so concisely.

Decide On A Specific Platform Or Multi-Platform Campaign

Most tech influencers will upload content to various social media platforms. However, many are focused on one platform for their primary content and use the other platforms as feeders to that main content.

For example, a YouTube tech reviewer may use Instagram to keep in touch with their audience, but it’s mostly to feed into their YouTube channel and not really used for original content.

When working with a top tech influencer, decide which platforms they specialize in to determine if that’s the right fit for your influencer campaign. After that, you can decide if you want to promote across various platforms or stick to one such as Instagram influencer marketing.

Adding multiple platforms can increase your reach, but be careful as it can impact your targeting and may reduce your overall metrics.

The key is to perform the same audience vetting of the other platforms as you do with the influencer’s main platform of choice. If the metrics are similar, you can consider a multi-platform approach if it’s within your budget.

Top 10 Tech Influencers

Now let’s get into the top 10 tech influencers including established names and a new generation of influencers who are on the rise.

1: Marques Brownlee

No list of tech influencers would be complete without Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) being near or at the top. Brownlee started his tech channel way back in 2008 and reviewed products he was interested in trying himself.

Much of his growth was based on his reviewing style and the rapid rate of smartphone innovation taking place when he started. Several of his phone reviews looking at various claims by Samsung or Apple went viral, helping him grow substantially.

Larger tech news outlets started featuring Brownlee in their articles, which further fueled his credibility and growth. 

Beyond just smartphones, Brownlee has covered a range of topics in technology and also focuses on automotive tech as well as legislation around encryption and data privacy.

In 2020, Brownlee was featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 list of social media stars. He currently operates 5 YouTube channels along with Instagram accounts and other social media assets.

2: Fireship

Unlike Marques Brownlee, Fireship likely won’t be on a lot of tech influencer top 10 lists like this. Fireship represents one of the newer types of contrarian influencers we wrote about earlier.

But this doesn’t mean that Fireship is anti-technology. The Fireship YouTube account and related properties have produced an enormous amount of coding tutorials designed for aspiring and accomplished software developers.

However, Fireship’s takes on technology and especially the current state of AI have broadened the channel’s appeal.

Fireship’s videos often contain hilarious sarcasm along with detailed meme references that keep audiences entertained as they learn about the latest AI trends. It’s a smart take on a fast-moving industry that has helped Fireship rack up millions of views from coders and non-coders alike.

3: Unbox Therapy

Founded by Lewis Hilsenteger, Unbox Therapy took the early unboxing video trend to new heights in the tech world. Unboxing was always popular but Lewis applied this to the tech world and discovered a huge audience.

One aspect that made Unbox Therapy unique was the focus on quirky tech products that many in the audience likely had no idea even existed. This made for fun and informative unboxing videos that set themselves apart from the typical fare found on YouTube.

As with any reviewer, Unbox Therapy has had some controversy that partially revolved around whether certain reviews were completely truthful or glossed over certain shortcomings of the product. This can harm authenticity but Unbox Therapy has continued with a dedicated audience and the channels are still growing.

Social media is prone to drama, so controversy is nothing new for large influencers with millions of followers. The key is how they manage those ups and downs and maintain their growth and connection with the audience.

4: Linus Tech Tips

Linus Tech Tips was founded by Linus Sebastian. He took a somewhat strange path to influencer stardom. He began his tech influencer career by creating videos for a Canadian computer store brand.

However, the company was unhappy with the money being spent on production and the low returns so they urged Linus to create a smaller, more personal channel to post more casual tech content at a lower cost.

That channel was Linus Tech Tips and the rest is history. Although the story seems insignificant, it really shows how in the early days, brands were not always aware of what content would resonate with audiences.

The original idea was to make lower production value content on Linus Tech Tips, but that content is what resonated with audiences the most. It shows that authenticity was the key to influencer success from the early days of YouTube and other platforms.

5: iJustine

Justine Ezarik, better known as iJustine also found fame during the explosion of smartphone technology around 2008. iJustine was one of the early vloggers or lifecasters on social media and made a viral video about her 300-page iPhone bill.

The video got international attention and Ezarik parlayed the fame well beyond the tech world. She was featured on several TV series and YouTube-exclusive web series soon after her viral success.

Justine now admits that iJustine was a bit of a character that she played, but that didn’t harm her connection with audiences as she continued to review popular Apple products despite her mainstream television opportunities.

6: Tech.Unicorn

Delia Lazarescu who operates the Tech.Unicorn account on Instagram is a former Google Cloud developer who turned tech influencer. Unlike many tech influencers who focus on YouTube, Delia gained much of her fame on Instagram, although she does create content on most platforms.

From coding advice, tech career tips, and vlogging about the digital nomad lifestyle, Delia has connected with an audience and brings a fresh perspective to the tech world.

7: Sarah Dietschy

Sarah Dietschy is one of the newer generation of tech bloggers and creates how-to videos, reviews, and vlog-style content about her various pursuits.

She has a smaller audience than some of the big-name tech influencers but she is representative of a growing number of tech influencers that blur the lines between tech, lifestyle, and career choices. 

8: Mark Rober

One thing that sets Mark Rober apart is his stellar background. As a former engineer at NASA, he definitely has the credibility to talk tech with his audience. That background has helped Rober turn his tech career into brand influencer partnerships with some of the biggest tech brands such as Google.

9: SuperSaf

Safwan Ahmedmia, who goes by the screen name SuperSaf, focuses on consumer tech product reviews and how-to content. Mostly geared toward his native U.K. audience, he’s growing in popularity in Europe and the U.S.

10: Austin Evans

A California native, Austin Evans uses a creative and personal video production style to convey his thoughts on the latest tech gear. His exciting content and visual style have led him to have partnerships with brands such as BMW and many others.

Considering Niche Tech Influencers

While most of the influencers on our list have millions of followers, there are still thousands of influencers with smaller audiences who are still very valuable to brands.

These smaller tech influencers usually cover more specific areas within the broader tech world. This can include DIY content, robotics, coding, or other areas that have a dedicated yet smaller audience.

It’s important to consider these smaller tech influencers if you’re brand or marketing efforts require extremely tight targeting.

The Tech Influencer Outlook For 2025

With the emergence of AI and the host of new functions it brings to our phones and devices, you’ll likely see a whole new generation of tech influencers cropping up. Similar to how the emergence of the iPhone and smartphones helped launch influencers like iJustine, consumer AI technology will likely do the same in 2025.

As with any new technology, consumers will want someone to help guide them as they make their decisions. Influencers will continue being that resource to millions around the world regardless of the technology that changes along the way.