If you’ve been keeping up the latest social media use and news, you know that the results from a CEO.com study were released and revealed a shocking fact: top Fortune 500 CEOs have little to no social media presence. This means no Twitter news feeds, Facebook pages or Google+ circles. The one exception: LinkedIn. Only 32% of top-level CEOs have one social media account, and a whopping 68% of our bosses have no presence on this burgeoning platform. So why the exception on LinkedIn?
According to the study, LinkedIn tends to be more popular with CEOs than with the public. For example, CEO Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard has 265,852 connections on LinkedIn. CEO Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase has 146,653 connections. And oddly enough, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer only has 139 connections.
CEOs on Social Media Use
CEO of note, Warren Buffet joined the Twitter platform last year, but he hasn’t tweeted since his first day on the site in May. He gained over half a million followers on a single day. Yet numbers like that can be misleading: the CEO.com report found that 22% of Buffett’s followers are fake accounts, and approximately 13% of all followers of Fortune 500 CEO accounts are also fake. In an article titled The Top 50 Social Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) on Twitter, a comprehensive list of CEOs employing social media use and doing a good job on Twitter are listed (including recommendations of those you should consider following).
While it is widely known that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hits the jackpot with 16,742,263 followers, Fortune 500 CEO participation on Facebook is stagnant, up 7.6% this year from 7% last year.
The takeaways for top-level marketing managers is that CEO social media presence is (and will continue to be) a must for organizations who wish to have a strong communication channel since the public craves access to instantaneous news and facts. As CEOs open the door to this medium, their anti-social social media use and behaviors will become a thing of the past. But they should remember: give quality not necessarily quantity.
Source link updated 11/14/2021
