An executive director at a publicly listed company that sells board risk and compliance software is one of the most credible people in her category. Ten years at the company, deep domain knowledge, the kind of expertise buyers would pay to sit across from. She also travels constantly and has no realistic chance of sitting down to draft LinkedIn posts on a schedule.
So someone on the communications team took over her social presence. He interviews her regularly, drafts from what she says, sends working drafts back for her feedback, and uses Rocksalt to generate those drafts in her voice, with her background knowledge and the industry data she'd normally reach for.
She went from posting once or twice a week to seven to ten times a week. Her commenting went from one or two times a week to twenty or thirty.
That didn't happen because she became a stronger writer. It happened because the routine moved to someone with the time, the tools, and the responsibility to run it.
Before choosing between an internal comms person and an external ghostwriter, it helps to be honest about what both models require from the executive. This is where most programs fail.
Finn Thormeier, whose agency helps B2B CEOs publish consistently on LinkedIn, has published his process in detail. The number that might surprise a CMO is the first one: roughly four hours of the CEO's time per week.
One hour is a recurring recorded interview, where the writer pulls out industry trends, customer conversations, product insights, and competitive positioning. Thirty minutes is review, and he's blunt about why it exists: "100% ghostwriting never works, I want them to add comments and make my pre-written draft their own." The remaining two hours are the executive engaging on LinkedIn directly, twenty minutes a day, answering comments and replying to other people in the space.
That last block is the one companies treat as optional but it isn't. An executive who spends time in the conversation shows up to the next interview with fresher material: a customer objection, a competitor's claim, a comment thread worth a real answer. When the executive disappears entirely, the writer has to fill the gap, and the posts slowly stop sounding like someone with a specific point of view.
This builds on the point from the companion piece on whether marketing should create a CEO's content: the opinion can't be manufactured by whoever is polishing the post. Moving the writing outside the company doesn't change that. It only changes whose desk the draft sits on.
The word makes the work sound like it starts and ends with drafting. It doesn't.
The first thing it buys is a publishing routine. Most executives don't go quiet because they have nothing to say. They go quiet because they're on a plane, in a board meeting, or dealing with whatever became urgent at 8:17 that morning. A ghostwriter, internal or external, exists to keep interview, draft, review, publish, and engage happening in weeks when nothing else about the calendar is predictable.
The second is a route to market for leaders whose strongest contribution isn't prose. This is not only a CEO issue. A CTO may have the sharpest read on how technical buyers evaluate a category. A VP of customer success may see implementation risk before anyone else. A long-tenured subject-matter expert may be more credible on a specific buyer question than the CEO is. None of them were hired to write LinkedIn posts.
The debate usually gets framed around authenticity, and that framing is too simple. A disciplined external ghostwriter with a real interview cadence will produce more authentic content than an overloaded internal marketer guessing at what an executive believes (or sometimes even the executive themselves who bangs out a post quickly without much thought because they know they need to).
So the useful question is whether the capability already exists in-house. If there's a social media or communications person on the team who writes well, interviews well, and can handle feedback from senior leaders, keep the work internal. That person has proximity an agency has to work hard to recreate: Slack threads, customer calls, product context, legal sensitivities, and the ability to catch a topic while it's still timely.
If that capability isn't there, external is the faster path. Good ghostwriters bring process and the confidence to pull material out of busy people. The cost is the constraint. Retainers commonly run $4,000 to $10,000 per month per executive, with volume discounts when an agency supports several leaders at once. For one high-priority CEO or founder, that's often worth it. For eight leaders across product, engineering, sales, and customer success, the per-executive model gets expensive fast, and the comparison shifts to retainers versus the loaded cost of an internal hire plus tooling.
The failure modes differ too. External programs weaken when the writer loses proximity: the posts stay polished but the insights get safer and broader. Internal programs weaken when nobody is really assigned to them, and executive content becomes the work everyone agrees matters and no one has a deadline for.
Both models can work. What neither one does is manufacture the executive's perspective — or their time. The four hours have to come from somewhere, and the CMO's job is making sure that expectation gets set before the program launches, not after the first missed interview.
More on the role of a CEO in building a thought-leadership strategy.