CEOs are very often the most visible faces of a company and hence naturally an anchor for a company's thought leadership program. This assumption is mostly right when the topic is company direction, culture, hiring, funding, or major customer milestones.
But when a prospect or buyer wants to hear from someone who has actually lived their problem the CEO may not be the right spokesperson if they haven't been on the customer side of the equation.
At an event management software company we work with, the CEO is perfectly comfortable on social. He started using Rocksalt because it helped him get into the right industry conversations every day. Once he saw that “doing LinkedIn” did not have to become a second job, he looped in his head of AI.
That person had every credential you would want in a spokesperson, but very little visibility on social. He had hosted events, spoken at events, and run his own podcast. He understood the small frustrations event organizers deal with constantly, the relief of a conference that runs well, and the panic when it does not.
He also disliked LinkedIn. He thought it was pretentious, and I suspect some part of him still does.
But once he had a rhythm for publishing only when he had something useful to say, he became a stronger voice for that buyer than the CEO. The CEO was still visible. But the head of AI was simply closer to the pain the customer felt when hosting an event.
Most companies frame this question too defensively: the CEO will not post, so who else can we put forward?
That framing makes the alternate spokesperson feel like a backup plan. A better starting point is to ask who in the company is most credible on the subjects buyers are already trying to understand.
For some topics, that will still be the CEO. For others, it may be the leader in product, customer success, sales, AI, data, or implementation. As I have written before, the person with the real depth is rarely the marketer. It is usually the founder or the senior executive who came from the customer's industry and lived through the pain point... or at least regularly spends time inside the customer problem. (Aside: my former CEO, HubSpot's Brian Halligan, never failed to do 2 customer calls/week, every week for 10+ years even as a public company, because he knew how important it was to have this context).
The four CEO roles in our parent framework still apply. A CEO can be the leading voice on company direction and a sponsor or private leader on more technical topics. Those roles can shift by subject without confusing the market.
There is a practical reason this matters beyond brand credibility.
Semrush analyzed 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited in AI search and found that individual member profiles made up a large share of what appeared in ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode. Meltwater's analysis across six AI models found something even sharper: about 75% of LinkedIn citations came from individual profiles, compared with 25% from company pages.
The detail I find most interesting is that 51% of those citations came from members with fewer than 10,000 followers.
That suggests popularity is not the whole game. Clear, useful expertise from a person who knows the subject can travel further than a polished company page or a generic executive post about innovation.
So if your head of AI, product lead, or customer success executive can explain a buyer's problem with unusual precision, that person may be a better public voice than a CEO posting at a higher altitude.
The most important signal is how a potential spokesperson is with customers.
Do they speak credibly without sounding rehearsed? Do customers lean in when they explain something? Do they seem to enjoy the interaction, or are they just tolerating another meeting on the calendar?
That customer signal matters more than job title. Social visibility is much easier to build when the person already has a natural way of being useful in conversation.
After that, ask them how they feel about becoming more visible. If they hesitate, do not immediately sell them on the benefits. Figure out what the hesitation is.
Some people worry they have nothing insightful to say. Others worry it will take too much time. Some, like the event company’s head of AI, object to the platform itself. Those are different objections, and they need different answers.
This is where the process matters. An interview approach (perhaps conducted with an AI over text messages or voice), or a structured prompt about a customer conversation can make the work feel less like “content creation” and more like explaining something they already know.
Start with two or three posts and then reevaluate, rather than having a fixed time period for a trial. That gives the executive enough evidence to decide whether the process works, and it gives them a graceful way out if it does not.
We have also seen the opposite case when expertise by itself is insufficient.
One executive at a fintech company had deep industry experience, but never found a rhythm on social. The issue was not a lack of topics. He had plenty to say. The harder part was the mindset: writing to be helpful, rather than writing to promote himself or the company.
Without that shift, the posts felt like marketing. And when an executive feels like they are doing self-promotion, they usually become inconsistent, overthink every draft, or stop entirely.
So yes, look for expertise. But listen for whether the person can explain what buyers are wrestling with without immediately turning it into a pitch.
The common worry is that a quieter CEO will look absent, or that buyers will be confused about who leads the company.
I have not seen buyer confusion become the real problem very often. Ego friction is usually the bigger risk. If leaders can get past that, the company benefits whenever buyers develop a positive impression of a credible person inside the business.
Still, the CEO should not disappear.
A CEO has a platform no one else in the company has. Even if they are not the deepest domain expert, they can speak in their own words about customer success, hiring, culture, company milestones, lessons from the market, and why the work matters. That kind of visibility gives the company a human center while leaving room for other executives to own the topics where they have more depth.
This is true at Rocksalt too. My co-founder Anita is a stronger voice on marketing than I am, so she is a natural spokesperson for us on those topics. I used to edit her more than I do now, partly because she uses Rocksalt herself. These days I mostly send her ideas, opening hooks, and the occasional nudge when I think there is a sharper angle.
Two voices, different areas of expertise, no confusion.
That is the model I would aim for in most B2B companies: not forcing the CEO to carry every conversation, and not pretending the company page can do the work of a real expert. The job is to make credible knowledge visible, wherever it naturally lives inside the company.