For many CEOs, having a social media presence is a clear case of, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
As digital marketing begins to push aside tried-and-true marketing strategies and social media channels morph into customer service channels, it’s becoming clear that we either have to jump on the bandwagon or get out of the way. At the risk of being left behind, I have also become active on social media, but I have to admit that I still harbor a touch of skepticism as to its value. As a writer, the idea of composing a complete Twitter thought in 140 or fewer characters still seems ridiculous, but I think I’m getting better at it. Still, I’m skeptical for a number of reasons. #ColorMeCynical
As an industry analyst, I have developed a keen ability to identify the glaringly obvious. This is true in the Twittersphere as well, where I have noticed that the tweeters with the most Twitter followers also tend to be the tweeters that follow the most people. In other words, if someone has, let’s say, 2,000 followers, it’s pretty likely that if you look at the number of people they are following it will be around 2,000. It reminds me of an old game played among breeders of Arabian horses several years ago. #scam
I live near and work in Scottsdale, Ariz., which is and has been for decades a hotbed of Arabian horse activity. There is a huge Arabian horse show that’s held here each February. It lasts for two weeks and breeders, competitors and buyers come from all corners of the world to attend the show and, in many cases, add to their stable of champion Arabians.
It didn’t take horse breeders long to figure out how the value of their stables and bloodlines would increase if they were selling their Arabian horses in the six-figure range. What started to happen was that breeders would enter into an agreement to sell one of their horses to another breeder for a six-figure sum, then sometime later buy one of the buyer’s horses for a six-figure sum. Pretty soon lots of Arabian horses were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, driving up all Arabian horse prices. It was nothing more than a shell game, but played with Arabians. #NotMyFirstRodeo
I think a similar phenomenon is occurring with Twitter except this one is the, “I’ll follow you if you follow me” game. That belief was reinforced recently when I came across an interesting article in the Financial Times newspaper about how some well-known CEOs use Twitter. The first thing that jumped out to me was the remarkable ratio of Twitter followers to following among these CEOs.
I believe that if I’m to get any value at all out of Twitter I need to actually read the posts from the people that I follow. That’s why the number of tweeters I follow is somewhere around 200. Since everyone doesn’t tweet something every hour of every day, I can reasonably expect to catch the important posts from the people I follow. If, on the other hand, I were to follow thousands of people my chances of catching the most important posts from these thousands of people would be miniscule. Apparently I’m not the only who thinks this way.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has 910,000 followers but he follows only 38. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has 1.51 million followers, but he follows 40 tweeters. Jacqueline Gold, CEO of Ann Summers, has 46,600 followers and follows 165. The CEO in our small sample who follows the most tweeters is Tony Fernandes, the CEO of AirAsia. He has 1.51 million followers and follows 310 people.
I consider myself to be fairly active on social media although I don’t camp out online as some people seem to do. I try to check in on Twitter a couple of times a day and post a tweet if something interesting is going on. So far I’ve sent out nearly 1,000 tweets which, to my ears, sounds about normal for someone who also has interests outside of social media. #getalife
The number of outgoing tweets of our executives tells a somewhat intriguing and slightly perplexing story. Apple’s Tim Cook is on the low end of outgoing tweets with 127. According to the Financial Times article, most of his tweets offer behind-the-scenes content from Apple. Mr. Fernandes and Mr. Musk each have 1,130 tweets, which is kind of a coincidence. Many of their tweets are about their favorite sports teams, including England’s Queens Park Rangers football team which is owned by Mr. Fernandes.
Ms. Gold, on the other hand, has posted approximately 25,600 tweets. Beg pardon? Creating that many Twitter posts sounds like a full-time job, which it very well may be. My guess is that Ms. Gold has an army of ghost writers posting tweets on her behalf. Interesting to note is that many of her tweets offer her opinion of the television show “Celebrity Big Brother.” #getalife²
The number of tweets sent by Ms. Gold may also have to do with the content of those tweets which, to me anyway, seems potentially much more interesting than the tweets of Mssrs. Cook and Musk. While most of us in the U.S. are not familiar with the Ann Summers Company, it turns out that Ann Summers is a British company with about 140 shops and is described on its website as, “One of the UK’s leading pleasure retailers for women.” I’ll let you figure out exactly what that means but if you really can’t crack the code, visit their website.
Despite the inconsistencies in these CEO Twitter stats, the bottom line remains that most CEOs don’t tweet. In fact, only 14% of CEOs of the world’s largest companies use social media as a way to communicate. Seems to me there is a huge disparity in the number of CEOs who insist on digital marketing and social media presence, and those who maintain a social media presence of their own. In the contact center industry and elsewhere, it’s a clear case of, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
I think I’ll tweet that. #busted