Top CEOs Still Ignoring Twitter and Facebook

It might not come as a surprise that many of the world’s top CEOs still are not onboard with the whole social networking thing. What is most interesting though is the percentage of CEOs who don’t care. 2 CEOs from Fortune magazine’s top 100 companies have Twitter accounts. 2! Only 19 have Facebook accounts and NONE have a personal blog. Pretty astounding figures really.

So why haven’t they started using social networking and why should they?

Well the obvious answer to the first part of this question is that they don’t see a need to. Business as usual is working just fine so why “waste” time on something that may or may not work or may not give a proper ROI for their energies?

The not so obvious answer would be how would you go about doing twitter or facebook? This is quite a serious question. Do you have multiple twitter accounts for business partners, customers, staff? What can you talk about, what can’t you talk about? If you make a channel that is exclusive how do you dictate who is allowed in or not? How can you make it compliant with various regulations, security and legal protocols?

I have often read articles where authors say, these guys need to catch up with the times, and CEOs who don’t use social networking are behind the times, but most authors fail to see how much effort, time, and even money would go into social networking when it comes to businesses of that scale. The bulk of CEOs who do use social networking are tech companies, startups, and SMBs. Startup companies can put social networking into their business culture instead of trying to fit it in. SMBs don’t have a bulky company policy to get in the way. And tech companies, well we are the industry that created this stuff, we better damn well be using it.

Should CEOs use social networks? I say yes, but with addendums. But that is an article for another time.