What's the ROI of your boss on LinkedIn?

If you've ever tried to get CEO, or your boss, to use LinkedIn to support your marketing, you'll know how painful it can be. But something is changing... Social Exec Comms is fast becoming a must-do activity for senior execs. Here's a little run down of how, why and what you need to do about it.

First off, what do I mean by Social Exec Comms?

In many ways Social Exec Comms is just an extension of what PR/Comms teams have done for decades, i.e. manage the ‘face’ of their business within their industry media.

But the big difference with social is that it’s always-on - so it needs planning and managing every day. It also grows in value incrementally, as your Exec’s presence grows, which means:

The more effort you put in, the more value you extract.

Social Exec Comms is on the RISE

There is strong evidence now that LinkedIn, especially, is becoming a ‘must play’ arena for business leaders.

According to a 2022 report, in 2015 only 39% of Fortune 500 CEOs were active on social media. By 2022, this number had increased to 70%. Within this majority almost all of the CEOs (97%) were present on LinkedIn.

In B2B, thought-leaders who share genuine insights on a regular basis and, crucially, engage with their audiences, are attracting large communities of devoted followers. 

Two shining examples of this new breed are:

• Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO at professional services firm, Genpact, who's posts are so personally written and honest that they really resonate with his 78,000 followers. 

• Ravi Kumar S, CEO at tech giant, Cognizant, who's posts to his 144,000 followers include lots of glitzy photo ops, but also day-to-day shots of him meeting employees and sharing his thoughts.

What’s driving this change?

Well, of course, there’s a solid logic for wanting to hear directly from senior execs.  The flood of low grade content marketing we’ve experienced in B2B over the past decade has turned customers into cynics. Most of us ignore 99% of the content we receive.

This has coincided with what we might call The Era of Authenticity.

These days, communicators who are trusted and convey value are prized. Hearing from knowledgeable leaders, in their own words, without the apparent filter of a marketing team or editor, ticks all of our boxes.

And indeed the causes of this uptick in CEO LinkedIn usage go beyond marketing.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, business leaders turned to LinkedIn to remain visible to their colleagues, using it to convey sympathy and support, especially on the darker days.

HR teams are also fully aware that discerning employees now check out their future bosses on LinkedIn for the inside track on company culture.

An honest, genuine LinkedIn presence suggests an open and inclusive approach.

Where's the ROI in Social Exec Comms?

To answer this, let’s dig into a specific example.

A couple of years ago my agency, OST Marketing, started supporting the social media presence (LinkedIn/X) of the President of one of the world’s largest tech companies. [This is what we do. Message me if you need help with yours].

Working closely with his in-house team, we regularized his posting schedule and improved his content quality, but also improved his outgoing engagement.

Crucially, the ideas and insights in his posts remained his.

His personality continued to shine through and we made sure to include ‘real time’ updates from his daily schedule, so the content was fresh and genuine.

The results were almost instantaneous…

• Within 30 days his reach and engagement levels doubled.

• Within 90 days he was attracting over 6,000 engagements per month. 

According to influencer platform, Onalytica, the average C-suite exec posts to LinkedIn 6 times per month and receives an average of 200 engagements per month. So our results were positive, but that wasn't the key learning...

The critical success factor was the quality of his audience.

While his posts attracted thousands of likes from employees, he also attracted engagement from his peers – CEO’s, founders, C-suite and Director-level execs across industry sectors.

His followers included an audience you simply cannot normally reach.

Two-way engagements on his LinkedIn posts quickly began to pave the way for high-level sales conversations; the kind of conversations you just can’t have unless you're dealing with senior people.

These are the kinds of opportunities your Sales Teams can only dream about.  Yet your C-suite has that power within their reach, today.

How are you preparing for this change?

What’s becoming clear is this:

The LinkedIn presences of your CEO and senior execs have the potential to be much more valuable to your brand than your company LinkedIn account. 

To realise this potential we are seeing companies starting to directly redress the imbalance between their investment in corporate (i.e. company) vs personal social media.

There are already extremes. I’ve seen the budget for managing the social presence of a single senior exec exceed $300,000 a year with a team of 30+ people involved in the process.

I’ve also seen even bigger programmes in which hundreds of internal thought-leaders are matched to specific target customers, to connect and engage with on a regular basis. This takes social exec comms into lead generation with an ABM flavour.

Of course, every company needs an active and credible company LinkedIn page, but perhaps the question we all need to be answering is:

How are we actively planning to generate value by investing in our personal LinkedIn accounts? 

Simply by having this conversation internally, you can start to realise the true potential of your leadership on LinkedIn. 

I’d love to hear how you’re addressing this challenge.  Have you made a start?  Got any interesting results to share?  Please comment below and I’ll reply.