What kind of social media content CEOs should create to benefit the company?

Abstract

Due to digitalization, the marketing environment of companies has changed and increased competition while forcing them to seek new strategies to gain a competitive advantage, especially in social media. As faces of the companies, chief executive officers (CEOs), and leaders can have a remarkable effect on influencing perceptions and shaping a company’s reputation. Potentially, CEOs can also build and strengthen relationships with customers, partners, and other stakeholders, establish trust and credibility and drive business growth and opportunities through their personal brands in social media.

Despite of various studies being conducted about the relation between companies and CEO brands and their benefits, fewer studies have been conducted from the point of view of the content. This study sought to fill this research gap by concentrating on the content CEOs are producing through their personal brands and especially on the types of content that create concrete benefits for the companies.

The study used a qualitative research approach and primary data was collected through interviews with CEOs of companies and people following CEOs in order to cover the perspectives of both content creators and content consumers. Findings showed that the most common types of content that CEOs wanted to share with their networks were educational and informational. Sharing information, insights, tips and own expertise has resonated with the followers and created engagement. Especially sharing own expertise was highly valued among CEOs and also followers appreciated the additional value received through the content. Furthermore, followers wanted to see the personality of the CEOs in their posts as well as lighter, entertaining content every now and then. Commercial and promotional content was examined to be unappealing and undesirable from both perspectives.

Two content frameworks were presented as the base of the empirical study. These frameworks were utilized as an inspiration and later on, the suitable parts were transferred and combined with the results of the content analysis to the new content framework for CEOs presented as a conclusion of the research. For future research, this topic and phenomenon offer various possibilities. A research giving more in-depth understanding of the most popular content formats could also be conducted by selecting a number of CEOs and measuring statistically what kind of posts created the most engagement. Also conducting a geographically wider international research could be a possible continuation to this study.