Your time is limited, your days are booked solid with meetings, you have investors to answer to, and are you are responsible for hundreds if not thousands of employees. You’re an executive. You’ve excelled throughout your career and have been entrusted with leading your organization. It is also likely that you’ve attained this position despite having little or no presence on Social Media. Why should you invest your time communicating on Social Media now? Where is the return on investment?
Authentic communication builds trust through increased transparency
Social Media is a great tool to communicate your personality, help you appear more accessible, and to build affinity. Using networks like LinkedIn or Twitter can help increase transparency with investors, employees, and the general public. Maintaining an active presence and communicating authentically on Social Media will increase trust with your key audiences. You can take advantage of these channels’ ability to reach your diverse target groups at once to efficiently provide them with a more personal and intimate perspective.
A corporation sharing a link to their earnings report is certainly helpful, but a CEO using that content as an anchor to explain why they are proud of the company’s achievements and hard work over the past quarter or year will resonate more. At the end of the day, there is always another human on the other side of the screen.
Social Media provides a canvas for executives to illustrate corporate values
The modern executive is no longer expected to simply lead their organization, but also to be reflect and embody corporate values, weigh in on societal issues, and at times, even take an activist role. Publish content and engage in public debate (where appropriate) on Social Media in a way that demonstrates the values that guide you in your personal life as well as guiding your leadership of your company.
Executives must lead by example as Brand Advocates on Social Media
Marketing and communications efforts are partly reliant on securing multipliers and getting past media gatekeepers. Employees are your most valuable brand advocates and recruiting them as multipliers can be crucial for success. In fact, a company’s employees are perceived as more authentic and trusted than its advertising. Recent data from LinkedIn show that employees have ten times more first degree connections than their companies have followers. Furthermore, those employees receive twice as much engagement than companies when sharing the same content.
With this in mind, it is imperative for Executives to lead by example: to demonstrate the importance of this medium for the company by maintaining an active social media presence. If Executives do not invest the time in Social Media, neither will their employees and this to the detriment of the organization.
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