21 Jul Four Ways to Grow on Social Media as an Executive
As an executive, being on social media has become an essential strategy for personal branding. Personal branding is beneficial for building trust with customers and improving your image. However, receiving engagement and followers can sometimes be difficult as social media trends evolve quickly. We explain four ways executives can grow their social media presence — which can sometimes even lead to them trending in the news. Keep reading for tips on how to increase your executive’s engagement.
1. Share Business Tips and Advice
Sharing advice and business tips is often an effective way to receive engagement from followers. These types of posts are also more likely to be reposted as users may want to share the information with their own network. Executives are often seen as experts in their field and for those who are successful in their business endeavors, their advice is all the more important and sought after.
Jacqueline Gold, the CEO of Ann Summers, does this in the form of Instagram Reels. Videos are a highly popular format on many social media sites because they’re an effective way to share quick tips. By including a question prompt in her post’s caption, she encourages her followers to engage with the post by commenting.
Universally the best ideas in software things that expand the size of a market. Find a problem that a large number of people or businesses have but only a smaller number currently solve, and build a cheaper or simpler solution for it.
— Aaron Levie (@levie) July 6, 2022
Another way to do this is on Twitter through a short message. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, is known for his Tweets on crypto, software, and other tech-related topics. In this Tweet, he shares his advice on having a software business. This is something his followers would be interested in hearing from him because he owns a large software company and is speaking from experience.
Both of these executives’ posts performed well because their advice came from their expertise. It also shows how open an executive can be because they are sharing their perspective and want to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs.
2. Be Your Authentic Self
Be creative, be funny, be unique — ultimately, one of the most effective ways to grow your social media presence and improve personal branding is to be yourself. After all, there are millions of social media users and only one “you,” so rather than adopt someone else’s personality or content strategy, it’s better to speak authentically. It is beneficial to share content that is memorable and makes an impact. This may be outside your main goals on social media as an executive but it benefits your personal branding and creates a more genuine persona for others to engage with. Consider an executive sharing their company’s press release versus a post where she’s sharing a meme or their favorite brunch spot. These more casual posts often share more about an executive’s personality and interests, and users respond well to that.
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Ryan Holmes, the founder of Hootsuite, is an example of someone who injects humor into his social media content. He posts jokes on LinkedIn and Twitter that sometimes relate to his business and sometimes don’t. The post above did very well in terms of engagement, receiving over 450 likes, over 20 comments, and over 10 shares. Followers are happy to get a break from business-related content, especially on LinkedIn. In the comments, people loved the joke and even encouraged him to post like this more often.
3. Take Part in Trending Content Formats
Creating content in different formats can sometimes be daunting as an executive. We most commonly see executives using written content such as Tweets or LinkedIn posts. The content that young people have been enjoying recently is short-form videos. If you’re looking to relate to the younger generation, creating a simple video post that follows a trend can be successful.
In the Reel above, Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group, does a transition as he changes outfits. This is a popular TikTok trend and he also uses audio that was popular at the time. The Reel did exceptionally well as he received over 3.4 million views, much more than the majority of his other Reel content. The video also relates back to his business as he is promoting his Virgin Voyages cruise ship. This video is simple and utilizes the video format for some casual and business-related content.
4. Discuss Popular Topics
Another way to grow your social media presence and potentially be in the trending section is by discussing popular topics, especially on Twitter. The “explore page” on Twitter shows trending topics in news, sports, entertainment, and other categories that relate to your interests. By checking in on these trends and posting content with the same keywords, your posts may be shown at the top of that page.
Strawberry supermoon … Sounds like a Harry Styles song!https://t.co/BXDLdfHBAy
— John Legere (@JohnLegere) May 28, 2022
John Legere, the former CEO of T-Mobile, often uses his Twitter account to talk about entertainment trends and his personal interests. He mentions movies and TV shows that were just released and sometimes includes pop culture references in his post, such as mentioning Harry Styles. This type of content that is outside the business realm is more relatable to the average user. Appealing to a broader audience means an executive’s post may receive more engagement, such as comments from other users sharing their opinions.
Benefit from Executive Social Media
We believe it is beneficial for executives to be on social media, not only to build their personal brand but also to support company objectives. This could mean posting Reels, discussing trends, or being an experienced thought leader within your industry.
Download our 4-step guide below to learn how to create an executive social media presence that is positioned for success.
Download our guide to executive social media!