Chief Executive Officers (CEO) were some of the last to jump on the social media train. With all the noise, it is not surprising that the top executive(s) would avoid any and all platforms that distract them from their core work of running a company. However, a recent study by Weber Shandwick, the third annual edition of this research, shows that LinkedIn is the preferred social network for CEOs.

Weber Shandwick released Socializing Your CEO: From Marginal to Mainstream, an audit of the online presence of CEOs from the world’s largest companies. This third installment of the Socializing Your CEO series finds that CEO online engagement has increased dramatically since the firm first began tracking the online sociability of chief executives several years ago.

As of 2015, CEOs have found their social footing

Overall, the number using social media is still low, at just 28 percent. Of those, there is a distinct favoring of some platforms over others. The most popular social networks used by CEOs are:

• LinkedIn, used by 22 percent
• Twitter, used by 10 percent
• None of the CEOs said they used Facebook or Google+ despite 10 percent claiming to have been using Facebook back in 2012.

The research finds that eight in 10 CEOs (80 percent) are now engaged online and via social media, a rate which has more than doubled since Weber Shandwick first began tracking the social activities of CEOs in 2010 (36 percent).

68 percent of CEOs engage through their company web pages. I am not surprised by this finding as it is part of the bigger content marketing trend where companies become media companies – self-publishers of news and information.

Corporate video is fast-becoming a standard form of communication for top executives (54 percent) and social network usage has now hit a record high (28 percent).

Weber Shandwick analyzed the sociability of the world’s Most Powerful Women (MPW) and found that 76% of MPWs are social, rivaling the rate of the world’s top male CEOs.

Some additional stats from this study:

• CEO Sociability by Region:
•   -USA: 95 percent
•   -Europe: 84 percent
•   -Asia Pacific: 55 percent

• 80 percent of global CEOs engage socially.
• 2X Increase in Social CEOs since 2010.
• 25 percent increase in European social CEOs (highest growth rate in this year’s study).

Through the Socializing Your CEO: From Marginal to Mainstream research, Weber Shandwick has pulled together 9 Tips for CEO Social Engagement. But they also published: The CEO Reputation Premium: A New Era of Engagement which surveyed more than 1,700 executives worldwide to explore the realm of CEO reputation to better understand what is required of leaders today.

Some of this growth may be due to simple demographics and younger socially-savvy CEOs are now moving up the ranks. But the data shows that however slow, more and more chief executives are finding it useful to go where their customers are hanging out and engage, at a deeper level. It is good news that nearly one third of the world’s biggest companies’ leaders are making themselves available to the public.

Source: Forbes