Tweeting CEOs, Opinion Leadership, and the Social Capital of Companies

In the postmodern age of social media, chief executive officers (CEOs) have become the public faces of their organizations on Twitter. Therefore, CEOs’ use of Twitter can be assumed to influence the social capital of the organizations they represent. In this mixed-methods study, this possibly influential relation is examined using the framework of principal-agent theory by focusing on the tweeting behaviors and strategies of CEOs as well as their follower counts. The results suggest that the CEOs who gained the most followers and, therefore, potentially increased the social capital of their companies tweeted positive messages to diverse audiences and actively maintained various stakeholder relationships.