04 Aug 3 Things Executives Aren’t Doing On Social Media (But Should!)

Establishing a successful executive social media presence requires a lot of strategy: both upfront objectives and ongoing management and performance tracking.

Many CEOs and executives think that just posting content on their social media account once or twice a week is enough, but the truth is that there are more factors that contribute to the overall success of their online presence. 

Keep reading to learn the three straightforward strategies that many executives aren’t doing on social media — but should!

1. Engage With Other Social Media Users

There are many ways to boost the visibility of a social media post, such as encouraging people to share the posts or using popular hashtags within the posts. (We wrote an entire article about this topic, so be sure to give that a read too: 5 Ways To Get Your CEO Noticed On Social Media.)

For CEOs and other executives who want to boost the visibility of their posts, consider tactics such as engaging with other social media users. For example, liking a post, adding a comment, or resharing a post if applicable. We call this “proactive engagement.”

Social media isn’t just about posting content. Interaction is a key component as well (the “social” part of “social media”). By leaving a comment on a post, there’s a higher chance that other social media users will see the executive being active on the platform (and a higher chance of them clicking to visit their profile or commenting themselves).

One way to start being proactive is to respond to those who leave comments on the executive’s posts. When a CEO, for example, responds to a comment left on their post, it encourages other users to leave their two cents as well. The CEO comes across as more approachable and engaging when they interact with connections online.

2. Leverage Video Content

One of the most popular types of social media formats is video. Consider TikTok, a platform that, until just last week at the time this article was written, was a purely video-only app (it now has some text-based content capabilities, though the majority of the app will still be focused on video).

Video continues to be popular among social media users, whether we’re talking about a professional business-oriented platform like LinkedIn or a more consumer-driven app like Instagram. It’s a dynamic and different way to share information, it can be entertaining, and most of all, it’s engaging. 

But, we get it — creating video content is hard. It takes time to research an engaging topic, write a script, schedule time to shoot the video, edit it, and upload it on social media. However, video will always be an important consideration for CEOs and executives on social media because of the many benefits it brings.

Video can be used to convey a lot of information in a short period of time and is often more interesting than a text-only social media post. Video content often drives higher engagement as well. Not all content needs to be a video. For example, if an executive is speaking at a panel, it may make more sense to take a photo of them versus a low-quality video from a distance of them on stage.

If an executive’s time is limited, consider reaching out to the company’s in-house marketing team or a social media content creation agency with video capabilities. With our own clients, we leverage videos in a number of ways, including creating short podcast clips to promote the full episode, text-based insight-driven videos, informative interviews, and much more.

3. Expand Their Network Through Proactive Outreach

The third thing that executives aren’t doing on social media but should is growing their network.

Most executives will naturally add people they know to their social media network, such as a new business partner or new client on LinkedIn. However, why stop there? Network outreach includes sending connection/follow invites to those who may be outside of an executive’s network — but still a part of their target audience. 

Of course, this also takes time — time to find the right individuals, craft custom invite notes, and send invites out. Again, that’s where the company’s marketing team or a social media agency can offer support.

However, it’s important to keep this in mind: just because your connections and followers grow doesn’t mean you’ll see a 1:1 impact on how much engagement you get on your posts. While more followers may mean an increase in impressions for a post, they may engage with the posts in other ways, such as verbally telling someone about it or turning on notifications so that they don’t miss future posts. These actions are almost impossible to track. Remember that as your audience grows, engagement per post typically decreases while impressions generally increase.

If growing your audience on LinkedIn or other platforms is your goal, book a consultation with us to chat about social media strategies you can implement.

Create a Holistic and Strategic Social Media Presence!

Here’s a bonus tip for what executives should be doing on social media: keep track of social media metrics. Depending on your goal, your tracked KPIs (key performance indicators) may change. In general, we split them out into profile-level metrics (e.g. follower growth, profile visits, etc.) and post-level metrics (e.g. engagement rate per post, impressions, etc.).

For executives just starting on their strategic social media presence, remember that it takes time. Getting a lot of engagement on posts doesn’t happen overnight, and even if a few posts go viral, it takes a lot of work to maintain forward momentum.

An effective executive social media presence that supports company (and sometimes personal) objectives comprises multiple different parts, from content creation, content management, online presence management, and performance tracking.

To help marketers and executives get started, access our free resources developed by our team of social media experts! We’ve taken our knowledge based on working with executives across multiple industries and created downloadable guides for your reference. Access one of them below!

How to Supercharge your Social Media ROI with your C-Suite!