Top CEOs Are Turning to Thought Leadership. Why Aren’t You?
When a $31.8 billion company like Paypal creates a role dedicated to CEO personal branding and social media, the “content-marketing-o-sphere” takes notice.
At KNG, we first saw the conversations on LinkedIn when, in August, Paypal posted that they would be hiring a Senior Manager of CEO Social Communications to develop a narrative strategy and manage the CEO’s digital presence.
So why is Paypal prioritizing CEO thought leadership branding through digital content and social media? Considering that over 50% of leaders are reading it and using it to make decisions around how they engage with other businesses, the better question is, “Why aren’t you?”
The power of social media & leadership branding
In February, Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez said, “Messages of brands coming from corporations are suspicious messages.” Fernandez described plans to focus on influencer marketing and spend 30% to 50% of their advertising budget on social platforms. He knows that, especially in the age of AI, people want to make informed decisions based on authentic messaging from the company, including its leaders.
This is why CEOs are leaning into leadership visibility as a competitive advantage. In a 2024 survey by APCO Insight, 77% of adults said a CEO’s reputation affects their willingness to invest in a company. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff regularly engages with customers on social media, and General Motor’s CEO Mary Barra’s active social media presence recently involved her appearance in a viral TikTok series parodying ”The Office” led by Mohawk Chevrolet. By putting themselves out there across digital platforms, CEOs build positive relationships with current and potential customers, employees, and investors, who associate that relationship with their company.
Higher stakes and higher rates
Around the same time as Paypal, Duolingo offered a $350,000+ salary for a new Social Media Director role. LinkedIn conversations about how valuable it has become went viral (1, 2, 3). What content marketers already thought about the importance of social media in PR and marketing, companies like Paypal and Duolingo were confirming with their decision to pay top dollar for it.
Not only are CEOs hiring leadership content experts, they’re hiring them with more responsibility. Paypal’s job responsibilities include leading advanced strategies on complex communications projects, collaborating with the executive team, and mentoring teammates. To be considered, candidates needed over a decade of experience and would report directly to senior leadership.
As Jason Patterson said in his LinkedIn post about Paypal’s move:
“PayPal CEO Alex Chriss has 75,000 LI followers while his company has about 2 million. But his personal posts already get more reach and engagement than PayPal's. And if he hires a full-time person to get more serious about content, he'll get a lot more. Dollar-for-dollar, PayPal will get a lot more out of it than if they poured the same money into the brand's social.”
As Jeneba Wint mentioned in her post:
“He’s already the CEO of a billion-dollar company. He already has brand recognition. He already has access. He already has an opportunity. To the world, he's already ‘made it.’ Yet he still knows one thing most executives and founders ignore: In the age of AI and infinite noise, your personal brand is your most valuable asset.”
SEO and GEO optimized
CEOs actively producing thought leadership content make themselves, and by association, their company, more visible to search engines. Now, more people are searching with AI, and marketers are focused on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to appear in LLM search results. But true SEO is still at the heart of GEO optimization, and thought leadership is an effective strategy for both.
According to ChatGPT, “The large language models (LLMs) powering AI tools learn from publicly available, high-authority content to surface the most relevant and credible answers to user questions. When a CEO publishes a blog article, LinkedIn post, or bylined piece in Forbes, that content gets crawled and indexed by search engines. Even for LLMs, effective keyword optimization still helps establish topical authority.
“The well-structured blog content that helps search engines rank your site also enables AI tools to understand, classify, and potentially cite your insights in responses. As social media posts gain engagement, this signals relevance and authority to both search engines and AI scrapers. Backlinks to a website or social media page from bylined articles in high-authority domains like Forbes further drive authority and brand trust signals. If a CEO's content is SEO-optimized and well-shared, it has a higher chance of surfacing as a citation or source in AI tools using LLM technologies.” (Edited for length and…well, sounding like ChatGPT)
What are you waiting for?
For CEOs, leadership branding can boost trust and accelerate deal velocity. According to the 2024 Edelman/LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 73% of decision-makers say thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing a company’s capabilities than traditional marketing. And 54% say “Organizations that consistently produce high-quality thought leadership content have prompted me to research their offering or capabilities.”
In 2022, a Harris Poll found the ROI on an average thought leadership spend of $194,000 to be around 1,300% when considering improvements in revenue, reputation, investment capital, and employee retention. Today, even more executives are starting to realize: thought leadership builds reputational capital that compounds over time. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes to catch up.
The best first step is to start now.
