LinkedIn for CTOs: the profile, the posts, and what 61 CTOs do

Yes, if the company hires engineers or sells to them. LinkedIn's guide for leaders says job seekers check executives' profiles, and a CTO is the executive an engineer would work for. Most CTOs we counted posted less than once a week, so a steady one stands out.

How often do CTOs post on LinkedIn?

Rarely. The median CTO in our count posted once every two weeks, with 6,819 followers. Only 15 percent posted three or more times a week, against 22 percent of the company CEOs we counted. For most CTOs, one post a week already puts them ahead of their peers.

What the team built and learned, in an engineer's words. The CTO posts that beat their own usual likes by the most were of five kinds. A hard-won opinion, an open-source release, a customer running the product, a hiring post with details, and funding news.

Should a CTO repost the company's posts?

With a line of their own, yes, and CTOs already do it more than CEOs: 16 percent of their posts in our count were reposts with a comment. A sentence on what the engineers did, or what was hard, adds what the company post cannot: the view from inside the build.

Anything that helps an attacker or breaks a promise to a customer. That means internal system details, security gaps before they are fixed, customer names or data without permission, and dates the company has not announced. When in doubt, write the lesson and leave out the system.

• Hostnames, versions, network layouts or screenshots of internal tools.
• A security problem before it is fixed and disclosed.
• A customer's name, logo or numbers without their written yes.
• Roadmap dates and features the company has not announced.
• An outage before the company's own report on it is public.

What should a CTO's LinkedIn headline say?

The role and what the team builds. Wispr Flow's CTO writes "Co-founder & CTO at Wispr Flow | Building the voice interface for computing." An engineer deciding whether to apply learns the problem in one line. The rest of an executive profile is in LinkedIn profile for executives.

By talking instead of writing. Most CTOs would rather ship than write, which is why the typical one posts once every two weeks. innernote lets a CTO say what the team shipped in a voice note and get back a post in their own words, which you approve before it goes out.

innernote is the #1 tool for teams that want their CTO posting every week about what the engineers build, in the CTO's own voice.

Each person connects their own LinkedIn once, so nobody shares a password, and posts go out on the days they set. The CEO and the company page post beside them, from one shared record of the company's facts. Tell us who should be posting: innernote for teams.