CEOs are on social media more than ever right now. Posting. Building. Showing up for their companies in a way most of them never did before.
And a surprising amount of it is quietly doing damage.
The ones I’m seeing in discovery calls aren’t doing this for vanity. They’re the deal-makers — the founders and senior executives who are in the sales calls, building the relationships, closing the business. They’re posting because they believe it supports what they’re already doing in the room.
That instinct is right.
The execution is where it breaks down. It’s showing up in discovery sessions and brand audits I’m doing right now, consistently enough that it stopped feeling like an outlier.
Most of it is AI-assisted. Nothing wrong with that. But AI makes assumptions about your brand when it isn’t defined … and no amount of prompting changes that. The output might be polished.
It won’t be yours.
And here’s the part that makes this hard to catch: nobody is saying so.
Think about position for a moment. You’re the founder. The check writer. The decision-maker. The person who sets the tone for everything, including what’s acceptable to say out loud.
Nobody below you is going to be the one to tell you it’s landing flat. The risk is too high and the upside too low. So they don’t.
What they do instead is “like” the post.
And if you’re thinking — but my posts get engagement — that’s exactly the problem.
That engagement is the professional version of staying quiet. People who have something to gain from your approval respond first. Their likes show up. Their comments land. The numbers look fine.
So you keep going.
Here’s a more honest diagnostic: review your last five posts. Look at the responses from people who had nothing to gain from responding. No vendor relationship. No job on the line. No introduction they need from you.
That relationship and the “like” is the real signal.
A CEO’s voice carries a different weight than anyone else in the company. It doesn’t get read as content; it gets read as the company’s thinking. The person making decisions, setting direction, closing deals. What they publish signals how the leadership thinks. And by extension, how the business thinks.
Generic content from the CEO isn’t a missed opportunity.
It’s a positioning statement.
And right now it’s being published by people who genuinely believe it’s working, because the people closest to them can’t afford to say it.
Who around you would actually tell you if it wasn’t working?
