International Research by ECCO: Corona doesn’t change top CEO’s communications habits

“Top CEOs stick to their communications habits through the Corona crisis. Only those already active on social media before the crisis use them to interact with their stakeholders in the actual situation. Generally speaking they are still very reluctant to send their messages through Twitter and Linkedin,” says Christian Kollmann, President of the PR agency network ECCO. For the third time ECCO analysed the personal accounts of big company CEOs. Targeted were the top 20 companies by market capitalisation in 17 countries worldwide.

Contrary to the general assumption that social media becomes more important through a crisis ECCO observed a nearly unchanged share of CEOs using Twitter and Linkedin compared to previous surveys in 2017 and 2019. On Linkedin only 46 % of CEOs now have and use a personal account. After a short surge in 2019 to more than 50 % the figure went down again.

Twitter is even more unpopular with the big company CEOs. Throughout all ECCO surveys since 2017 the share of users is stagnating with a maximum of a bit more than 15 %. “Obviously Donald Trump is no role model for people bearing responsibility in big companies,” adds Christian Kollmann.

Even the Co­ro­na cri­sis did not ac­cele­ra­te the use of so­ci­al me­dia by top CEOs. Re­search done by the PR agency net­work ECCO in 15 coun­tries even shows slightly decli­ning ac­ti­vi­ties of top ma­na­gers on Lin­ke­din. En­ga­ge­ment with Twit­ter is growing a bit from a very low level.

Donald Trump is no role model for CEOs of top companies worldwide. Most of them don’t even have a personal Twitter account. Only a fraction of them are active on the social network. Even the enhanced need for communications through the Corona crisis did not change the situation. Actual research done by the PR agency group ECCO International Communications Network shows nearly the same results as former studies done in 2019 and 2017.