The road to digital leadership

But if only a fraction of HBR’s best-performing CEOs are active on social media, is it really worth the time and effort it requires? According to author Alexandra Samuel, the answer is an emphatic yes. For starters, it takes less time to post and caption a photo than it does to respond to an email. And Samuel argued in a Wall Street Journal column that “CEOs who don’t use Facebook are like CEOs who don’t watch TV: They’ve fallen into CEO World, that parallel dimension where leaders are disconnected from the way most people live, shop and connect.”

It’s Samuel’s last point – connecting and engaging with customers and employees where they are – that holds immense potential for leaders. Leaders’ pride in their companies empowers employee advocates to amplify that message. It also allows leaders to highlight social causes that are important to them or their company, and to speak directly to customers. And choosing to be on social media signals leaders are transparent and open to candid feedback. Nearly three out of four US respondents in Weber Shandwick’s survey agreed that a company whose CEO uses social media is more trustworthy, while 76 percent of employees said they would prefer to work for a CEO who is visible on social media.

Facebook is nearing 2 billion monthly active users; Instagram has more than 700 million and Twitter 300 million. LinkedIn doesn’t publish its monthly active users, but does have 500 million members. It’s not simply there are a lot of people on social media – with more joining each day – it’s that social media is increasingly where these people find their news about companies and leaders.

According to research by the nonprofit news organization Grist, it’s not just Millennials who are ditching newspapers in favor of their newsfeeds. “Facebook was the social network where senior executives were most likely to engage with business content.” Karen North, the director of the digital social media program at the University of Southern California, explained this trend in a 2016 interview: “People are now just assuming relevant information will come to them. If it doesn’t, it probably wasn’t worth listening to anyway.”

Some leaders are taking note. Spencer Rascoff, the digitally savvy CEO of Zillow Group, the publicly traded online real estate platform, said in a 2017 Facebook Live that he is active on social media because “I want to be where the conversation is happening, where people are talking about our company, our brand, our services, or our category.” Rascoff shared in that same Facebook Live that he had engaged personally with 90 percent of new employees on social media before they’d joined the company.

Rascoff predicted that social media will soon be a non-negotiable for those in the C-suite. “CEOs and other executives who are not on social media – they will be,” Rascoff said.

So how, exactly, can a leader begin to follow in Rascoff’s footsteps?

Pick a channel

Trying to establish a presence on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter all at once is likely to be overwhelming. Select one, maybe two, based on who you want to reach and how you want to reach them. Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, started posting on Instagram in 2015. He joined Facebook a year later, and posts primarily brief videos or photos with short captions. He doesn’t have a presence on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Take it seriously

Be clear about who you are, who you are talking to, the tone of your message and what you want to say. In other words, have a strategy in place. And then invest in a team that can deliver on that strategy. It takes time, resources and people to plan, create and share content, respond to any comments or questions, and determine what sort of content to share – a live video versus a photo, for example – and on what schedule. And executives themselves need training and repetition to master digital communications. Leaders get media training before their first radio, print, TV interview – why should the standards be any lower when communicating with larger audiences on social media? “It’s not a game for me,” said John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile US, in a 2016 interview about his use of Facebook. “It’s a very serious, highly leveraged part of the way I run my company.”

But not too seriously

Bill Gates posted on Facebook celebrating his wife Melinda’s birthday. Richard Branson posted a photo of his bruised, bleeding face after taking a spill on a bicycle. Meg Whitman, CEO of HP, posted a photo of the simple cubicle at which she works. All were among their most-liked and most-shared posts that year. People enjoy seeing that leaders are humans, too. People want to know who leaders are before they’ll listen and trust what they say.

Stick with it

Assuming a fairly regular cadence of publishing, the longer leaders have a presence on social media, the larger their audience size, reach and engagement tends to be. In other words, a consistent approach sees a greater return on investment over time, as each post helps build – and engage with – a growing audience. Patience does pay off.

Measure, adjust, repeat

No strategy worth its salt can exist without a way to measure its effectiveness. Most social channels provide some kind of dashboard that tells you who’s looking at your content and how it’s being shared. Take advantage of it and adjust. In some research, video posts by leaders were found to be shared twice as much as posts containing just a photo, and generated three times as many comments, on average. Complement this with other metrics as well – internal surveys, panel responses, message testing.

For all the benefits having a social media presence can deliver, it does bear some risk. Criticism and customer complaints are largely inevitable, though the people most likely to see and engage with your content tend to be fans and followers – people who have chosen to follow you in the first place. Most social channels also offer moderation tools to block offensive language or derogatory terms.

It has been said often – especially by leaders – that trust is in short supply today. For all the research and data about audience size and social engagement, at their core, social networks are simply an efficient way for business leaders to be more transparent and earn the trust of those whom they’re leading, one post at a time.

Mike Krempasky is a Partner in Brunswick’s Washington, DC office and leads the firm’s Digital offer.

Craig Mullaney is also a Partner in Brunswick's Washington, DC office. He formerly led the global business influencer program at Facebook. Mullaney was a senior national security appointee in the Obama administration and staff member on the 2008 presidential campaign. He is an Army veteran and the author of The New York Times bestselling memoir The Unforgiving Minute: A Solider's Education.

Illustration: Carlo Giambarresi