19 Mar How Many Fortune 500 CEOs are on Social Media?
November 18th, 2020 update: Did you know that most Fortune 500 CEOs are on social media in 2020? Visit our updated article here to learn more about which platform is the most popular among executives.
Back in 2015, CEO.com published its 2015 Social CEO Report, which included a widely quoted statistic pertaining to executive social media. That statistic was the fact that only 39% of Fortune 500 CEOs were on any social media platform, and 61% weren’t on any at all!
We’ve seen these numbers quoted as recently as this year, so we thought it was time for an update. Our team at Influential Executive replicated the study in February of 2019 using the most recent Fortune 500 list, going through 500 executives one by one to search across platforms for public pages and evaluating the level of activity for each. The results? As of 2019, 54% of Fortune 500 CEOs have at least some social presence.
As of 2019, 54% of Fortune 500 CEOs have at least some social presence.
LinkedIn leads the pack for these executives—of the Fortune 500 CEOs on social, 50% of them have a LinkedIn profile. The second most popular social platform is Twitter with 14% of social CEOs having a publically-searchable profile. Perhaps unsurprisingly, platforms that are typically more entertainment driven like Instagram and YouTube are far less popular, making up less than 1% of social CEO usage combined.
Now the Question Is: So What?
While social usage has increased among Fortune 500 CEOs since 2015, the increase is a little less dramatic than we might have expected. While we’re finally to a point where just over half of all the CEOs evaluated have at least one social account, there are still 46% of CEOs without any social presence whatsoever, which, as we’ve detailed in our latest whitepaper, is a significant missed opportunity. These days a company’s executives are among the most valuable tools in its marketing arsenal when it comes to moving the dial on company objectives.
“A company’s executives are among the most valuable tools in its marketing arsenal when it comes to moving the dial on company objectives.”
What’s Next?
As a next step, our team is executing further analysis on the dataset with the intention of unveiling answers to some burning questions we still have, including: just how active are each of these CEOs? How big are their social followings? How does their level of engagement compare to that of their brand’s company pages? If you’re also interested in the answers to these questions, join our mailing list to make sure you’re the first to hear about our latest findings.