How do CEOs win on LinkedIn?

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If you're new to our blog, every couple of weeks our hybrid team of humans and AI agents research topics affecting reputation, communications and stakeholder engagement.


Quick sidenote: We've been running a popular (and free) AI policy-focused daily news wrap - and as a bit of a fun test, we tried out the upgraded Google NotebookLM newly infused with Gemini 3 to turn our news wraps into podcast-style digests - check it out! The AI podcasters are surprisingly engaging. It's super impressive what Google has just shipped! 


Back to our main story: This week we tasked our AI agents to analyse LinkedIn activity from every S&P 500 CEO with a LinkedIn account to identify what's driving engagement on the platform - who's winning and what content performs best. This ended up with just over 6,000 posts from ~400 CEOs being analysed!


The Headline.

Product launches and innovation content absolutely dominates LinkedIn engagement, achieving an average of 2,225 likes per post - nearly 50% higher than the next best-performing category. 

Interestingly, by sheer volume, posts related to internal team and culture matters were the biggest post category but had middling to mediocre engagement rates. 




Finding 1: The Engagement Elite vs The Volume Players


Our AI agents identified two distinct strategies amongst top executives:


The Engagement Elite (maximising impact per post):

  • Sundar Pichai leads with an extraordinary 14,310 average likes per post - but only posts 18 times
  • Jamie Dimon maintains 6,207 average likes across just 5 posts


The Volume Players (building presence through consistency):

  • Satya Nadella posted 126 times, accumulating 987,016 total likes despite a lower per-post average (7,834)
  • Jim Farley posted 137 times with modest per-post engagement (870 likes)
  • Michael Dell posted 109 times, averaging 1,752 likes per post


Yes... and so what? Both strategies can work. Pichai's selective approach generates 83% more engagement per post than Nadella's frequent posting strategy. However! Quantity does have a quality of its own and a high volume of posts can accumulate a huge number of likes (and subsequent reach). The key thing is to pick a strategy and do it with conviction and authenticity.


Finding 2: Content Categories That Actually Matter


Whilst CEOs post most frequently about Team & Culture (1,325 posts), the real engagement happens elsewhere:


Top Performing Categories by Average Engagement:

  1. Product Launches & Innovation - 2,225 likes per post
  2. Personal CEO Journies & Reflections - 1,488 likes per post
  3. Company Milestones & Achievements - 1,326 likes per post


Volume vs Impact Mismatch:

  • Industry trends, CSR / ESG related contented and general how-to / educational type content generates the lowest engagement despite representing relatively high proportions of posts
  • Team & Culture posts achieve just 806 likes on average despite being the most frequent category


Yes... and so what? Many CEOs aiming to maximise reach are fundamentally misallocating their LinkedIn content efforts. Content that reflects internal company happenings does not get the same kind of interest as content about new launches, innovation and major announcements OR authentic personal content from the CEO about their experiences and career journeys. 


We've attached the visual breakdown showing engagement patterns, posting frequencies, and executive rankings. Feel free to share these internally or with clients - particularly communications teams planning 2026 content strategies.


If you or your clients need support understanding your LinkedIn performance, executive positioning our AI agents can provide deep-dive analysis across platforms. Let us know how we can assist: hello@omniscan.ai