Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has 18,764,161 followers on his own site and 266,638 on Twitter.
Warren Buffett has only tweeted twice since May 2, but he already has 542,000 followers. The first tweet simply said “Warren is in the house.” The second tweet, also on May 2: “Read my new essay on why women are key to America's prosperity: http://cnnmon.ie/18eXfik .” Just two short tweets and he amassed more than a half a million followers.
Despite the powerful reach of social media, a new study shows that less than a third of CEOs at America’s 500 highest-grossing companies are taking advantage. The study is by CEO.com a news site for CEO-related content and Domo, a business software company. To compile the data, they searched for the top 500 CEOs on Twitter,
According to the study, only 32% of top CEOs have at least one account on a social network. Some 68% have no social presence at all.
Not surprisingly, CEOs are most active on LinkedIn. Some 27.9%, or 140 CEOs, have LinkedIn accounts. That’s up from 25.9%, or 130, a year ago. In fact LinkedIn is more popular with CEOs than with the general public. According to a Pew study released earlier this week, 20% of the U.S. population who is online, is on LinkedIn. Among the CEOs who have LinkedIn profiles, just 25 of them have more than 500 connections.
A few examples of CEOs with LinkedIn profiles:
Twitter has far fewer CEO users, with just 5.6%, or 28, from the top 500 companies. That’s up from 3.6% last year, but still a small number. Among online adults in the U.S., 18% are on Twitter, according to Pew.
Of the CEOs on Twitter, only 19 are “active,” according to the study, meaning they tweeted in the 100 days prior to the study. The active CEOs tweet, on average, about one time per day. Aside from Warren Buffett, tweeting bosses gain an average of 838 new followers each day.
The number of CEOs on Facebook is slightly higher than Twitter, at 7.6%. That’s down slightly from a year ago, at 7% and strikingly smaller than the U.S. population. According to Pew, 67% of online adults use Facebook. (If you factor in kids, I’m sure the percentage is much higher.)
Google+ has hardly any users among CEOs: just five bosses out of the top 500. (The Pew study doesn’t measure Google+ users.)
Not surprisingly, the most popular CEO on social media is Mark Zuckerberg, with 18,764,161 followers.
One interesting note about the study: It explores how many of the CEOs’ 2-million-plus Twitter followers were fake, and finds that some 30% have fake profiles.
A couple of takeaways from the study: Given the rise of Twitter and the public’s hunger for instantaneous news, CEOs may want to consider diving into the medium. But they should focus on the quality of their posts, in order to attract serious followers.
