I am starting to see similarities between Warren Buffett and myself. 

Mr. Buffett just embraced Twitter a few months ago. I just got on Twitter a few days ago. 

Within 30 minutes, Warren Buffett had 30,000 Twitter followers. Within 30 minutes, I had 4. Two of them were from our social media team that was training me.

Mr. Buffett is a multi-billionaire. I am a………

OK. So maybe I am not so similar to Warren Buffett, but I was fascinated to read that he is among the very tiny percentage (4%) of CEOs at the largest companies in the U.S. that are on twitter. Nearly 3/4 of these CEOs are not even on LinkedIn. Isn’t that surprising? More on that in this interesting article on Quartz.

So why are so many CEOs shunning Social Media? Richard Branson is a great example of how his leadership and voice on social media has greatly contributed to his company brand at Virgin.

At some point all the justifications in the world…

“Too busy to learn it and keep up with it.”

“Not sure of its value.”

“Potential for ‘foot-in-mouth’ PR disaster”

“I’m doing fine without it”

…all these great justifications just stop mattering. Because the wide adoption of social media puts you in danger of not being relevant to your coworkers, customers, and employees. 

Four or five years ago, I dipped my foot into the Twitter water for a small publishing company. I made one tweet along the lines of, “Well, here I am on Twitter. Not sure what I should do with it.” And never made another tweet. I was not prepared to take it on and I was very busy. 

I’m still very busy like everyone else, but I am re-engaging and the reason is this: I have been sitting on my content perch working hard to write relevant and engaging content for our clients and for us. I never really paid a lot of attention to what happened next. I knew our social media team took that content and posted it on groups, made tweets about it, and got it out there in the world. 

But lately, I am tuning in to snippets of the social media team conversations about this page getting more views and tweets or that blog getting more LinkedIn shares. And I had my social media epiphany. What’s the point of working so hard to create great content and branding if it’s not getting the widest possible share? I can no longer hide behind my computer screen. It’s time for me to hold up my end of the oar for our company in the Twitter stream. 

Lucky me, I work with a team of social media specialists. So I invite you to follow me on this blog and on Twitter @thewritecasey as our team gets me up to speed on social media.  I’m calling this series Social Media Virgin. Join my coming out party to find the nitty-gritty first-person guidebook about what you need to know to get on or optimize Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.

In the meantime, I am happy to share that I am a now a contributor on Business 2 Community. Please click here to read my article about how to manage the risks of social media engagement by creating a social media security policy.