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A study sponsored by Domo and CEO.com found 61 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are not active on any major social network, and could be missing an opportunity to use social platforms to interact with their key audiences.
The annual survey, which investigates the social media habits of business leaders, shows that social media usage among this elite group is gradually increasing, as 70 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs weren’t active on social media when the first report was published for 2012.
Pew Research released a study this past summer that showed 63 percent of people who use Twitter and Facebook, reported getting their news from those sources.
“Today, Facebook alone has more than 1.55 billion users worldwide. That is a huge audience that is still growing,” Julie Kehoe, vice president of communications at Domo, told eWEEK. “So sharing company news, updates and insights will continue to be an important way for CEOs to leverage social media for their companies.”
She said in terms of evolution, the most progressive CEOs will explore and leverage new mediums and platforms to connect with customers where customers actually spend time.
Kehoe pointed to Michael Rapino, CEO of LiveNation, as a great example, as he was one of the first Fortune 500 CEOs to leverage Instagram.
“In this year’s report, we’ve also tracked a growing number of CEOs leveraging video via their company YouTube channels,” she said. “We wouldn’t be surprised if that number continues to increase over the next few years, as video is an easy way for a variety of audiences to consume information in today’s online world.”
Kehoe also noted she was excited to see that the number of F500 CEOs with no social presence at all has dropped from 70 percent to 61 percent since 2012, however, she was still surprised the number of CEOs with no presence is so high.
The current report found 195 CEOs on the list are active on at least one of six major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube), yet no single CEO is active across all six platforms.
“Even more, it seems that quite a number of CEOs who join social media do it just to cross it off the list, rather than use it as a regular way to engage with key audiences,” she said. “For example, the survey showed that the 31 CEOs who were active on Twitter last year only tweeted once every five days on average, which was a significant decrease from the previous year when active CEOs averaged one tweet every other day.”