The Missing Communications Channel: The Case for a Social CEO
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October 04, 2024
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In South Africa, we have seen a growing trend of CEOs starting to engage in social media. This has largely been driven by more defined content strategies that seek to create a well-rounded persona for the people leading the business. Despite these efforts, only 37% of JSE 100 CEOs are actively posting on LinkedIn.
Leadership communication has become increasingly important over the years, and having a social CEO is now more important than ever. Companies need to take significant steps to ensure that their actions match their leaders’ words, with a renewed focus on purpose and values, and using these bedrock elements of their organisations as the “North Star” to guide strategy and decision making.
With this growing trend we can see that South African leaders are falling behind and need to catch up with the ever-changing landscape. For example, the FTSE 100 leaders are three times more socially active. But this is not all on the shoulders of CEOs. There is room for senior business leaders—from CFOs to CMOs—to communicate their business stance and objectives more clearly.
Globally, content published by business leaders generates more than twice as many comments as corporate channels, so we need to think strategically about executive engagement on social media. But just as the most effective corporate channels are driven by bespoke strategies, business leaders also need a significant level of strategic input to guide their own social media engagement.
For the first time this year, we analysed the LinkedIn presence, reach and resonance of all identifiable ExCo members in the JSE 100 by market capitalisation, ultimately categorising almost 515 individuals and their 972 posts to calculate a personalised FTI Digital Impact score for each executive. This score highlights which leaders are having the most impact on LinkedIn, and by combining these scores across leadership teams, we were also able to assess which organisations are having the most impact collectively.
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Published
October 04, 2024