No, it’s not a trick question. There are CFOs who use social media. A recent survey by Leadtail, a social media marketing agency, analyzed tweets and shared links from 502 U.S.-based senior finance professionals (CFOs and VPs of Finance) in the fourth quarter of 2013. Here’s what they found:
News and lifestyle content comprised 38 percent of the top 100 content sources the finance executives shared. After that came business and tech, at 35 percent, and photo or video content at 7 percent.
The top hashtags used by CFOs hint at what they were thinking about last quarter:
The publications, brands and people most retweeted by CFOs were not a surprise in some respects (@WSJ, @Forbes, and @HarvardBiz were included in the top five). Some of the other Twitter handles on the list, however, showed that finance chiefs are not only about business. The Twitter accounts @SportsCenter, @espn, @TheOnion (the satirical news site) were among the top 10, and @RedSox, @JoelOsteen (the televangelist) and @NBCTheVoice were not far behind.
Finally, the terms CFOs and VPs of Finance used to described themselves on Twitter is revealing:
Note the inclusion of “mom” and “mother” (proportionally, are female CFOs more likely to use social media?) and “triathlete.” (If you want to know more about finance chiefs who do extreme sports, see David McCann’s story on what CFOs do for fun.)
As to the metric many consider most important on Twitter, a user’s reach, CFOs have some work to do: the median number of followers per finance professional was 82.