4 Best Ways to Leverage Social Media as an Executive
People trust the organisation they work for more than they trust almost anything else. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer puts trust in “my employer” at 78 per cent — fourteen points ahead of business generally and twenty-five ahead of government — and 73 per cent of people expect the chief executive to lead the work of bridging divides.
Turning up is no longer the hard part. As at 2024, 74 per cent of Fortune 500 chief executives had a presence on at least one social platform, and 98 per cent of those who did were on LinkedIn. Being there is table stakes. Being worth reading is not. Here are four ways to leverage social media as an executive, generating awareness for both your company and your personal brand.
1. Make sure to react and comment
There’s a reason this is number one. It’s easy to believe social media for executives is all about posting how-to articles and generating awareness, but like many things in life, social media starts from what you’re doing for other people.
So make sure you react and comment on other people’s posts! It’s the building block of everything else you do on social media. The best thing is, reacting and commenting is the most time-efficient thing you can do on social media. To research, plan, and publish an article, you need to block out at least a couple of hours. To read someone else’s post and write a thoughtful comment, though, takes about 10 minutes. It’s even easier if you found a friend posted an image.
It’s important that your comments are genuine, but don’t be harsh—if you think someone is an awful writer who knows nothing about their industry, don’t write a critical comment. In fact, as an executive, try not to write anything critical at all. Your criticism holds significant weight, and leaving a bad comment on social media is like criticising someone in public. Reserve your criticism for face-to-face interactions.
2. Write articles based on your experience and problems
Once you’ve reacted and commented on other people’s work, they’re much more likely to read your stuff. But how do you begin? It’s easy to look at someone else’s budding LinkedIn or Medium account with 100,000+ followers and get discouraged that you’ll never reach that level.
Like always, the trick is to think small. You can’t win a premiership in one go—you have to build it up with every training session. And to write a good article, you have to start in bite-sized parts. Don’t worry about article structure or getting readers or SEO; it’s too complicated to worry about at the start.
Instead, try writing about the problems you faced as an individual or team. For example, Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva, wrote a very long LinkedIn article detailing some of the problems she faced while creating her startups Fusion Books and Canva. She mentions that when she and her then-boyfriend Cliff Obrecht — now her husband, and Canva’s chief operating officer — were starting Fusion Books, some clients would ask to speak to the manager. Since it was a two-person job with no manager, ‘Cliff would pause a moment and change voices.’
It’s personal details like this that make you seem more trustworthy and authentic as an executive on social media.
(Of course, writing articles is never that easy. And before you build a plan around whichever format is currently being recommended to you, it is worth knowing that most LinkedIn trends are not worth chasing.)
3. Don’t be perfect, but be careful
The best thing about social media is that it makes everyone seem human. That goes for executives, political leaders, celebrities, athletes, and more. And if you want to be human, you’re not meant to be perfect.
Apart from personal details, the other great thing about Melanie’s article is that she’s vulnerable. While she’s chief executive of a company last valued at US$42 billion, in her article she writes about her fears, insecurities, failures, and the times she thought she wasn’t good enough. People are just people, no matter if you’re old or young or rich or poor, no matter what gender or race.
On social media, you shouldn’t try to be the perfect CEO or managing director, you should just be yourself. Something as simple as sharing a favourite breakfast meal can help generate employee engagement. Your team members could be thinking, My boss eats Weet-Bix at 7am just like I do.
But everyone’s heard horror stories of people sending the wrong Tweet and getting fired the next day, and as an executive, the heat on your shoulders is only magnified. Who knows, maybe you evade taxes, and your Weet-Bix photo accidentally includes incriminating evidence. Apart from trying to be a better person regarding the illegal stuff, the best thing to do is to get someone else to check every social media post you make. (You’re an executive; this absolutely isn’t over the top.) You can either turn it over to a trusted friend, a dedicated employee, or you can …
4. Deal with what is already out there
It’s a headache, we get it. Even if you can write witty comments, post advice articles that generate tens of thousands of reads, and snap photos like a true professional—you still have to devote lots of time, because social media awareness doesn’t happen by itself.
And there’s the part nobody plans for: everything already online with your name on it. An abandoned profile. A bio on a former employer’s site still listing a job you left years ago. A conference programme, a photograph from a decade ago, a comment thread you had forgotten. At executive level you are searched before you are shortlisted and again before an offer, and that results page gets read as evidence.
That is the work our Online Reputation Management service does — an audit of what a hiring panel actually sees, consistency between your profiles and your resume, and the stale material that can be updated, removed, or simply out-ranked. It is scoped per engagement rather than sold from a rate card, because for some people it is an afternoon of tidying and for others it is not. We have worked with senior leaders from Telstra, EY, Deloitte and Woolworths, among others.
Besides, if you’re not carrying the safety and the housekeeping, you can focus on just having fun—which is one of the best parts of social media. Yes, social media is fast becoming part of the executive job, but it shouldn’t be a chore like administrative activities. If you’re having fun and being genuine, your social media influence will surely be more effective.
Figures checked 19 August 2026. Trust in employer and expectations of chief executives: 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, released 18 January 2026 (fieldwork 23 October – 18 November 2025, almost 34,000 respondents across 28 countries). Fortune 500 chief executives on social media: Influential Executive, 2024 data, updated 28 February 2025 — no later edition has been published. Canva valued at US$42bn at its August 2025 employee share sale, still the figure reported in June 2026.
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