How CEOs Twitter with Customers: Key Insights and Future Research Directions: An Abstract

In recent years, social media has emerged as a popular communication channel for senior management, especially for chief executive officers (CEOs). Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms because of its ease in reaching out to customers, employees, media, and the general public (Weber Shandwick 2017). Some of the current and former CEOs on Twitter include Richard Branson (Virgin Group), Tim Cook (Apple), John Legere (T-Mobile), Aaron Levie (Box), and Michael Dell (Dell).

This study analyzes how CEOs communicate with their customers via Twitter. The aim is to help develop guidelines that leverage Twitter in leadership communications with customers. Based on a large-scale content analysis, we propose a model that categorizes differences in CEO Twitter use according to four dimensions: content professionalism, language professionalism, interactional effort, and information cues. We also develop coding schemes and measurement scales to map the relative position of each CEO account onto the four dimensions.

Our study makes five specific contributions. First, it draws theoretical and managerial attention to the important role of corporate leaders on social media, which is lacking in prior research. Second, it presents the first comprehensive content analysis of the tweeting CEO phenomenon. Third, the study offers a useful tool for research on CEOs’ practice on Twitter. The four-dimensional model provides researchers with a useful instrument to examine and categorize Twitter practices. Fourth, we developed a coding matrix and measurement scales for all four dimensions. This matrix should be useful in guiding practitioners on measuring, comparing, and monitoring Twitter usage of corporate executives. Fifth, our study presents four maps that capture the over 300 CEO Twitter accounts’ position relative to one another on each dimension. Our scores and maps of tweeting CEOs provide scholars and managers with useful knowledge on CEOs’ practice on Twitter.