Antisocial CEOs: Executives Not Embracing Social Media
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. CREDIT: CEO Image via Shutterstock |
All the time spent in meetings and running their companies leaves CEOs little time to do other things like spend time on social media, new research has found. As a result, 70 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have no presence on social media.
Among those CEOs who embraced social media, the most popular network was LinkedIn, where 26 percent of executives had pages. Just 20 percent of the general public is similarly on LinkedIn. Other networks were not as popular among executives, however. Just 7.6 percent of CEOs were on Facebook and 4 percent were on Twitter, compared with 50 percent of the general population that uses Facebook and 34 percent that uses Twitter. Additionally, less than 1 percent of CEOs were on Google Plus and zero CEOs had Pinterest pages.
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Those percentages equal out to just 38 of Fortune 500 CEOs having Facebook pages and just 20 having Twitter accounts. Of those 20 CEOs with Twitter, five have not ever tweeted. On LinkedIn, 10 CEOs have more than 500 connections, but 36 have one or no connections. Just six CEOs contributed to blogs and just John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, maintained his own blog.
"The results came as a surprise considering that social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are part of the daily fabric of life," said Josh James, founder and CEO of Domo, the executive management platform that conducted the research. "We really expected to see more social engagement from CEOs, especially since the benefits of social media are no longer just wishful thinking."
CEOs may not be able to ignore and be skeptical of social media for much longer though, especially if they wish to run a competitive organization, the research found.
"CEOs who use social media are growing their businesses, attracting lifelong customers, generating exposure for their companies and closing new deals," James said. "As consumers become more social savvy, so must company leaders. We expect to see CEOs getting more and more social in the near future."
This research was sponsored by Domo and CEO.com.
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