You might think Indians are crazy active on social media—trolling on Twitter, fighting on Facebook, stalking on Instagram and the likes. But this hyper-activism is yet to percolate down (or up) to our corporate leaders, it seems.
According to a new study, Indian CEOs are relatively silent on social media, compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world. The study by Ecco, a global network of communication specialists, found that less than 20 per cent of Indian CEOs were active on LinkedIn and just about 10 per cent on Twitter—much lower than the global average.
The study looked at the 30 largest companies by market capitalisation across 21 countries worldwide.
Comparitively, 58 per cent of global CEOs are active on LinkedIn, and 17 per cent on Twitter. This include the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who has 1.1 crore followers on Twitter. CEOs from France were found to be the most active on social media, followed by Denmark and Australia. Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, CEO of Telefonica, Spain is the most active CEO on Twitter with some 36,000 tweets since 2010—an average of 10 tweets per day.
Of course, some Indian corporate honchos are pretty active, for example Anand Mahindra, chairman of M&M, as well as Uday Kotak, CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank. However, overall, the study found many Indian company heads still hesitating to have an active presence, thereby a direct having a interface with their customers, through this medium.
Ecco had first conducted a similar survey two years ago. Then, as now, CEOs from the US have, by far, the most followers across various platforms.
