4 Types of Social Content Your CEO Should Be Posting

Many CEOs and founders agree that they should be posting on LinkedIn to communicate directly with their audience. They understand it’s not 2005 — they don’t need to rely on reporters to tell their story. They can use their own channels to drive pipeline, recruit top talent, and rally the industry (including investors) around their cause.

But the very common follow-up question is: What the hell do I talk about?

To that end, there are basically four content buckets available to any CEO.

1. Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is about sharing your view on where your industry is broken, what needs to change, and (sometimes) what your company is doing to fix it. Help people envision a better future by critiquing the status quo and pointing to alternatives. The specific issues you comment on may or may not relate to your offering.

If you’re a CEO, you already have a philosophy about how your corner of the world should work. Your job is to translate that philosophy into narrative. What’s the outdated logic holding your industry back? What false metrics or misaligned incentives need to die? What future are you building toward and who benefits when we get there?

A few examples of questions to ask yourself before writing:

• What is the real obstacle to progress in my industry — technology, incentives, or culture?

• What’s the flawed assumption everyone else keeps making?

• What’s the $100B hole in my industry no one’s addressing?

• What’s the new metric or idea that will replace the old one?

When you write from this place, challenging orthodoxy and framing the future, your audience starts to see you as the one building what comes next.

2. Building in Public

This is where you show your work as a CEO, founder, or executive.

Building in public means showing what it takes to build: the challenges, tradeoffs, lessons, and even mistakes. The best “building” content is candid. It gives people an inside look at what it’s like to lead, to hire, to grow, to change direction, or to bet on a long-term vision.

Posts that start with “Here’s what we got wrong…” or “Here’s what I wish I’d known when…” build credibility.

You can talk about things like:

• What you’ve learned about hiring and managing people

• How you’ve repositioned your company or product

• The tradeoff between short-term efficiency and long-term conviction

• What most CEOs (or founders in your industry) get wrong

• How your company evolved from 0→1, 1→10, and beyond

This bucket humanizes you. It builds trust with talent, partners, and investors because it makes you more relatable, and it grows your audience because folks don’t need to be in your specific corner of the industry to appreciate this kind of content.

3. Case Studies

Most CEOs underutilize case studies on social because they think case studies belong on websites or in sales decks. But you absolutely can and should provide concrete examples of business success — of your technology driving results — on social.

Case studies are a way to turn your customer successes into credibility and pipeline. They don’t have to be long or self-promotional. They just need to tell a clear story: the problem, the change, the outcome.

Ask yourself:

• What’s a recent client success that illustrates the bigger shift we’re enabling?

• What measurable impact did we have: revenue, efficiency, reach, engagement?

• What lesson does this story teach others in our space?

When you can name the client, great. If you can’t, anonymize it. The key is showing that your product or service works, not to brag but to help the reader understand the change you’re driving. If done right, case studies help the reader; they aren’t self-aggrandizing.

4. Data and Trends

If your company has access to unique data, insights, or behavioral patterns, use it. It’s one of the most powerful ways to establish authority, differentiate from competitors, and gain attention.

Every company has something interesting buried in its dashboards: trends in customer behavior, emerging signals about market shifts, or evidence that validates your core narrative. Share that. Turn internal findings into public insights.

Ask:

• What data do we have that no one else does?

• What’s changing in customer behavior that our data uniquely reveals?

• What metrics from our product reinforce the story we’re telling about the industry’s future?

This kind of content reinforces your thought leadership. It also provides a service to your audience by helping them better understand the industry, which is what content marketing is all about.

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Every CEO should be posting regularly across four buckets: thought leadership, building in public, case studies, and data. Together, they form a simple system for reputation building: ideas → authenticity → proof → credibility.

If you post consistently across those dimensions, you’ll become an industry voice that people follow — because you’re teaching them something that helps them understand their work and do it better.