If you’re the CEO of your company and are not social media savvy, you might want to change that. Here’s why:
Social media can be more than just driving sales, it can be a reflection of confidence & good leadership. This is why many C-suite executives have taken to being social media savvy. When the top management is active on social media, it harbours a strong sense of honesty & confidence in the brand & the company.
80% of employees say that they prefer to work with Social CEOs
Employees too will go the extra mile to promote the company’s products, services or culture.
They’ll identify better with the company and its goals when they know their CEO is more attuned to their needs.
Staying up-to-date is not a choice anymore, it’s expected & necessary. And if you’re active on social media, you’re always caught up on everything. This helps you adapt to changing social or economic environments. You can keep a tab on the online behaviour of potential customers and accordingly make business decisions.
Set a number of followers you want to target (per week/per month) and work to reach that goal.
You can also use your social media accounts to direct traffic to your company website.
According to a study, most high-performing social CEOs have two or more social media accounts. Experts advise that 95-97% of the content should be business-related. Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg & Elon Musk stand out as Social CEOS by striking a perfect balance between personal & business content. They’ve successfully managed to put their personalities into their social media accounts.
These leaders don’t just use social media as a promotional tool but also as a means to get people to perceive the company through them as leaders.
Social media also helps in crisis management. For g, if your company is planning layoffs or a change in policy which may not necessarily benefit the employees, you can preempt the news with the blog posts on Facebook or a Tweet. This may just manage reactions better; employees will know where to look for the latest information about the company.
Of course there’s a risk of your account getting hacked but that shouldn’t stop you from leveraging the social media tsunami which doesn’t seem to end anytime soon. Make sure you take the required measures to protect your social media accounts.
Some more tips which will help you get started on social media:
- Post Share-worthy Content: Let content be conversational and not just one-sided.
- Post Sporadically: Out of the 86% of consumers who follow brands on social media, 60% get annoyed when they see brands post too much promotional content. if you set the target as 1 post per week, honour it.
- Engage with the Media: Don’t shy away from the media. Go ahead and post press kits, sound bites or relevant information about journalists-this is the best way of being in their good books
For starters, you can check out the social media accounts of Google CEO, Satya Nadella, CEO and Co-founder of Slack, Stewart Butterfield and Richard Branson.
