LinkedIn has become an obsession of top corporate brass. What gives?

More and more, top company executives are posting on LinkedIn.

Since the beginning of the year there’s been a 23% increase in posts by CEOs on the site, according to LinkedIn, and a lot more of their content is going viral. From August of last year to this year, the number of people following these CEOs has surged 31%. For these company heads, LinkedIn has become far and away their most important social platform, with nearly 60% of CEOs surveyed by Inc. magazine this year saying so, compared with 18% citing Facebook. The site formerly known as Twitter is the preferred medium of just 0.6% of CEOs.

With so many executives waxing poetic on LinkedIn, things can get weird. Business leaders are being vulnerable and they are going to Burning Man. A retired Amazon executive took a story of heartbreak over his former CEO seducing his wife and shoehorned it into a list of business learnings.

Some executives use their questionably real children as storytelling vessels for their business acumen. The social account BestOfLinkedIn, where you’ll find the more outlandish examples of executive LinkedIn behavior, has a hashtag dedicated to #MadeUpKidMonday.

There are so many examples of executive LinkedIn posts filled with emoji, #learnings, and corporate pablum that it’s hard to single any one out. “Broetry” is a term coined for the style of long, punctuated, action-oriented posts common among LinkedInfluencers, meant to keep you clicking for more (and to game the algorithm with your perceived interest).

“They are abusing this copy-and-paste strategy of these tall tales of business that are supposed to make them stand out, but all they are actually doing is becoming more of the same,” John Hickey, a creative director, who runs the humorous BestOfLinkedIn, told Sherwood.

“They’re just finding out now that, ‘this is a good marketing channel for me,’” he said. “They’re late to everything.” Multiple leaders have tried to get Hickey fired over the LinkedIn posts he highlighted, Hickey said.

The vast majority of LinkedIn leaders are posting mostly benign business advice eked out from their years at the top and giving added context and color about their businesses.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted for the first time on LinkedIn four months ago, and is mostly posting about company earnings, conferences and philanthropy. Spotify’s Daniel Ek is giving context for earnings calls and discussing new features in vertical videos. Ex-Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz publicly criticized the new Starbucks CEO and offered advice in a post after a poor earnings report. That new CEO was gone within a few months.

LinkedIn leaders of all stripes do their best to humanize themselves, going for runs on global business trips and talking about childcare struggles that led them to found childcare businesses. They announce retirements or even death.

They also use these posts to offer genuine insight, but that’s rarer.

From startup founders to leaders of the biggest companies in the world, everyone seems to want to be a LinkedInfluencer.

Why are they doing this and why now?

I wondered aloud (on LinkedIn, of course) why these business warriors were suddenly busying themselves with social media.

Did their marketing department finally convince them that bringing their message directly to consumers and investors is more cost-effective? Was it the universal pull of becoming an influencer? An ayahuasca trip gone awry? A void left by Twitter? Did working from home separate them from a captive audience on whom to sprinkle wisdom? Is it about proving oneself in a tough job market or simply not having enough work to do? Is everyone else doing it and now ChatGPT can do it for them, too?

It’s probably a bit of all of the above.

“My sense is that it's, number one, they want to tell their story, they want to be heard.” Dan Roth, editor in chief and VP of product at LinkedIn, told Sherwood. “There's also a business objective in talking to the world, and they want to make sure that they're shaping the story.” He added that the site is a place where executives can reach investors, employees and customers at the same time.

David Johnson-Igra, founder of ghostwriting consultancy for executives Scribes, says he’s seen a major uptick in leaders looking to amp up their LinkedIn presence to generate leads, create brand awareness, and to make up for the shrinking amount of journalism geared at smaller enterprises.

“All money is green. For a venture capitalist, the only thing they have to sell that’s different is their opinions and beliefs and their insights,” Johnson-Igra told Sherwood.

“It's natural that these kinds of folks are showing up on LinkedIn to underscore that they have a perspective that's unique, that's strong, and they have insights into the market to identify with people that they're trying to work with.”

Michael Grimm, SVP of PR firm Reputation Partners, who said he’s seeing more executives ask for help with LinkedIn communications than ever before, said it’s about trust building and spurring business growth. There’s also staple LinkedIn tasks like recruiting.

Some were doing it on their own before it was cool, like Gary Read, CEO of alcohol-free wine company Bolle Drinks.

“I do it myself, always have and even before LinkedIn was popular for this, I maintained a public blog for the same. It's my way of creating a little more personal connection between the company, myself, and our customers,” he told me on LinkedIn. Read said that previously working at a Fortune 500 company, he would get into arguments because the business would try and control what he posted, which would have caused his posts to lose their authenticity.

“My posts are random. Not timed. Not reviewed by anyone and honestly may be completely boring. But they are me.”

Hard times and tighter marketing budgets might also be to blame.

“There is now a greater sense of ownership among senior executives to drive new business and customer acquisition,” Joe Jaffe, a marketing executive at design firm Perception, said, “because salaries are down for everyone and revenue and margin-based bonus structures are more prevalent than ever, especially amongst smaller firms.”

He called the practice “marketing with decent reach disguised as thought leadership.”

Indeed, it appears marketing departments are pushing many CEOs onto LinkedIn.

“Marketing is making me do it,” Avi Goren, founder and CEO of review, listings, and menu management platform Marqii, said. “At least, that's how it started,” he said. Now, he’s come around.

“Even in B2B, our restaurant partners don't want to buy from a business. They want to buy from another human,” he said. “If one of my posts helps a hospitality business or potential partner better understand Marqii and want to learn more about us, then being a little noisy on LinkedIn is worth it.”

In addition to churning up customers and investors, these executives and their companies see LinkedIn as a way of making their own news, getting ahead of other stories or at least making sure their alternative stories are out there. It’s also a way to remind people in a remote world they still exist and are hard at work.

“Hybrid and remote is making them feel they don't ‘lead’ anymore,” said Bidjan Nashat, executive-turned-founder of leadership coaching firm PotentialU. For some leaders leadings means “they are in a room with people and they can tell them what to do.”

He also added that some might be modeling themselves after Elon Musk, who despite leading multiple companies, can’t get off social media.

Indeed, the site formerly known as Twitter is also part of it, along with other changes in tech and media.

The decline of Twitter — it’s seen by controversy-averse brands as a liability — has left a vacuum. Executives hunger for that same release valve but have taken it to another platform, that’s much more business oriented than X. They’ve taken to LinkedIn and picked up its tics.

You can also blame generative AI for suddenly making the executive masses more loquacious. Writing can be a hurdle even for business elite and ChatGPT and built-in writing tools on LinkedIn lower the bar.

The result is more everything in the content sphere.

As founder of FractalPR Colin Crook joked on my LinkedIn post, it’s a “saying things Renaissance!”

How to do it right

If you’re going to represent your company by posting thought leadership on LinkedIn, obviously avoid the blatant bad behaviors noted at the top of this article.

Experts we spoke with said it was important to be original and authentic, which can be hard to do. Ask yourself if you’re posting the same stuff as everyone else and if it’s really adding value into the world (or if it’s simply adding more into an echo chamber). Draw the line before getting too personal or forcing a business narrative where it doesn’t belong.

Also, note that being a LinkedInfluencer just isn’t right for everyone.

Olivia Walch, CEO of science-backed apps company Arcascope, said she felt angst watching her peers have so much to say — and so much time to say it — on LinkedIn.

Her thinking on the topic evolved from believing that posting on LinkedIn was a waste of valuable time to later worrying that being so busy meant she wasn’t doing something right.

“You could frame it as an indicator that business is going so well that they've just got abundant buffer in their schedule and they can fill their hours with posts.”

Ultimately, though, she’s chosen not to post that much, saying that for her the idea of being a LinkedIn thought leader felt inauthentic and a bit cringe, though she said she’s seen others get a lot out value out of doing so.

“Know yourself as an executive, know what your style is,” Walch said. “If this is advancing the goals of your company, keep doing it,” she said. “If you are doing it just to fit in — like I have felt the urge — and you're not advancing your company, you're just wasting time and need to get back to what matters.”