The big business captains may be old sea dogs of finance, but when it comes to venturing into the vast sea of social networks they prefer to drop anchor. In fact, only a third of the top American CEOs are present and active on social media. The analysis was published by Forbes, historic American economics magazine known for its unmissable rankings, which draws a merciless portrait of the ruling class grappling with new technologies, the only credible life preservers in times of crisis.
The data comes from the latest report by Ceo.com, a site aimed at the business world, and Domo, a software company. A survey that scanned the activity on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google of the 500 most important US CEOs for a month.
Only 32 percent of CEOs have at least one social network account. In other words, 68 percent of them do not have a profile, not even a representative one.
The most active, and this is no surprise, are on LinkedIn, the professional network par excellence. The CEOs with an account, in this case, are 27,9 percent, up by two points compared to the previous year. And whoever is present also has a busy social life: a quarter of users have more than 500 contacts. In fact, LinkedIn is more successful among managers. Only 20 percent of the US population is on the professional network, according to a Pew study released this week.
The kings of LinkedIn are Met Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard (over 265000 contacts) and Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase (at 147000). Surprisingly, Marissa Meyer, number one at Yahoo, is there, but she only has 139 friends. A historic company like Ford is faring much worse: not even a shadow of Alan Mullaly, CEO of the car company.
Twitter is growing, but the numbers are still low. Just under 6 percent of managers have an account, up from 3,6 percent last year. The problem here is, if anything, laziness. Only 19 out of 500 administrators write 160-character messages, but no more than one a day.
Things are a little better on Facebook, where 7,6 percent of ads are present. For the record, 67 percent of the American population is on the network of Mark Zuckerberg, who - by the way - is the most popular CEO on social media, with nearly 19 million contacts.
