CEOs want to be social media influencers. Not everyone is on board.

For years, Braden Wolake has posted everything from business lessons to photos of animals on his LinkedIn page. On a late summer day, a fateful midweek post stopped a marketing executive in his tracks.

Mr Wolake shared a teary-eyed selfie with a message about how he felt after making his staff redundant. He was truly a “crying CEO.”

“I woke up the next day and texted my marketing person and said, ‘Looks like it went viral last night,'” Wolake said. The post received over 57,000 responses and over 10,000 comments.

Users accused the hypersocial CEO of being “manipulative” and showing “complacency.” The photo “would make a great dartboard,” wrote another.

Executives and founders like Wolake were sold on the idea that a vibrant social media presence could increase brand awareness for individuals and the company as a whole. However, reality is not as perfect as imagined.

Often these leaders come off as creepy rather than relatable. And they’re learning the hard way that their digital footprint can even have a significant impact on their business.

Ann Mooney Murphy, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology who studies how corporate leaders achieve celebrity status on social media, said, “There can be great benefits for CEOs to be online, but it can also come with great risks.” “We need to tread carefully.”

The pitfalls of using social media for business leaders are becoming increasingly apparent as more executives use the platform. Nearly three-quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs had at least one social media account last year, up from about half in 2019, according to Influential Executive data.

More than seven out of 10 Fortune 100 CEOs with social platforms will post at least once a month in 2024, an increase of 32% from a year ago, according to an analysis released this week by communications firm H/Advisors Abernathy. CEOs especially flock to the work-focused social site LinkedIn, posting on average three times a month.

Murphy said an active presence on social media can help increase brand awareness and attract attention from mainstream news outlets. It also allows executives to build direct, quasi-social relationships with consumers — relationships that were once limited to traditional celebrities like actors and athletes, he said.

While company news was front and center in these posts, H/Advisors Abernathy noticed that executives were spending more of their social space sharing personal events. This soft style of content — for example: meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shares photos from Taylor Swift’s ‘Ellas’ tour, goldman sachsMurphy said David Solomon posting details of his DJ sets helps keep his followers interested.

A subsector has emerged around executives’ social media habits, with several companies offering training programs and consulting services focused on best practices. paypal made a splash in the marketing world earlier this year when it posted a “CEO content officer” role that paid more than $300,000 to lead its social media communications strategy.

But in recent years, a growing list of anecdotes like Wolake’s “crying CEO” experience have shown how posting throughout life can go wrong.

In October, Jason Janowitz boasted on X that Blockworks, the cryptocurrency company he co-founded, had experienced “significant growth” and was on track to achieve “record revenues” in 2025. The company also said it would close its news department and recommend staff to anyone who hires journalists to cover digital currencies.

One user suggested that Janowitz ditch the smiley face on posts announcing layoffs and adopt a less “victory” tone. Someone else responded: “You should talk to the actual people affected” before “jumping into the next thing”.

Yanowitz, who declined CNBC’s request for an interview, later wrote to X that he “should not have mentioned revenue” in his original post.

Around the same time as Janowitz’s tweet, the following video was posted on social media: snowflake Mike Gannon, head of revenue, provided a case study of how these incidents can develop into real-world crises.

In an Instagram clip that has been viewed millions of times, Gannon said in an on-the-street interview that the data storage company plans to raise $10 billion “within a few years.” Shortly after, Snowflake said in a regulatory filing that the statements made in the interview were not authorized and that investors “should not rely” on them. The company declined to make Gannon available for an interview.

tesla In between musings on political and cultural issues, CEO Elon Musk shared his vision for his business venture on social media. Two years ago, Musk found himself in court defending comments related to his business plans made on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

In some instances, readers responded directly to executives with content they found problematic or disgusting. Some, like Ryan Benson, scoff at the widespread trend among business leaders to connect directly via social media.

“It’s completely dishonest,” Benson, 28, said. “They’re not trying to talk to people in the way that maybe influencers are successful. They’re trying to talk to get people to think about their position.”

Management missteps on social media can lead to complaints from investors, consumers and employees, said Murphy of the Stevens Institute of Technology. In some cases, statements made on social media can lead to increased regulatory or legal risks for the companies they represent, he said.

Despite their setbacks, business leaders who have seen the other side of social media have no regrets about being online.

HyperSocial’s Wolake said he initially took time away from LinkedIn to let the dust settle, but now he thinks twice before posting. However, Wolake still encourages other business owners to consider the benefits and use social media to grow their brands. If someone brings up a tearful photo of him, Wolake ignores it.

“If people want to call me the ‘crying CEO,’ you’re welcome,” Wolake said. “If they could actually see me, they would see me smiling much more often than they would see me crying.”

When Yehong Zhu, co-founder of media technology startup Zette AI, jumped on an everyday trend, her counterparts called her out for being lazy. People said she should be “ashamed” and “fundamentally useless to society”. One commenter said: “I’m printing this and sticking it on my wall to remind myself every time I find myself believing in meritocracy.”

Ms. Zhu received a handwritten harassing email attached to a mailbox sent to her office. But she also noticed a flurry of press coverage involving company names and product waitlisting, highlighting the power of publicity, even if it’s negative.

“After getting so much attention, I realized that maybe all the attention is good attention,” Zhu said. “As long as your name is on their lips, you’re doing something right.”

Zhu later realized that her post had been taken as “fodder for anger.” This genre of content was so notorious that Oxford University chose it as its word of the year for 2025. She is currently undergoing a social media rebrand and is considering leaning into more controversial posts in hopes of gaining more attention online.

“I wasn’t trying to outrage the bait,” she said of the original post. “The day I actually tried to enrage the bait, everyone would actually enrage.”