The number of Fortune 500 CEOs with a presence on social media has climbed slightly to 39 percent in 2015 from 32 percent a year earlier as new CEOs join the list and bring with them new online habits.
Seven of the 11 CEOs who joined the list in the past year use social media, indicating the increased likelihood of the younger generation of business leaders to use such sites, according to a study by business management software provider Domo.
‘While CEOs are connecting with consumers like never before, it generally hasn’t translated to them being all that more social compared with years past,’ the study notes. ‘Improvement in the stats for CEOs and social media is being impacted by CEOs who are new to the Fortune 500 list, and not by increases in social media usage by Fortune 500 veterans.’
The study shows that LinkedIn has the biggest contingent of Fortune 500 CEOs, with the number of CEOs on the network rising to 32 percent in 2015 from 25.4 percent the previous year, the study says. Seventy percent of CEOs with just one social media account joined LinkedIn first.
Only Google CEO Larry Page and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg operate their own YouTube accounts, but 208 CEOs last year featured in at least one video on accounts operated by their companies.
Facebook is used by 11 percent of CEOs on the Fortune 500, up from 8.3 percent last year. One in five of the CEOs who use Facebook have fewer than 100 friends and almost half have fewer than 500.
The number of Fortune 500 CEOs on Twitter rose to 50 last year from 42 the year before but activity has fallen, with the number of CEOs who tweeted in the last 100 days dropping to 62 percent from 67 percent, the study shows.
Only 17 CEOs have Google+ accounts – a number that has more than doubled from eight last year – and only 2.6 percent have an Instagram account. No Fortune 500 CEO is active on all six main social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube.
