Last week I hosted a live session for a webinar room full of higher ed marketing and communications professionals, and within the first two minutes we were comparing notification badge counts. Somebody logged 691 unread emails. Somebody else said inbox zero, always, like it was a badge of honor.
That contrast is exactly where this conversation needed to start.
Because somewhere between those two extremes is where most of you are working right now. Some leaders have dedicated support behind their public presence. Others have a communications professional squeezing executive strategy between a dozen other priorities. And some are largely figuring it out themselves.
Yet behind every executive account that looks effortless, there is a person, or several people, making very deliberate decisions about what gets posted, who writes it, how it sounds like the person whose name is on it, and how anyone will ever know if it worked.
That’s the real subject of this post: not whether your president should be on Instagram, but whether the system behind that account can hold up.
And “leader” is a wider net than it looks from the top of an org chart. This isn’t only about a president or provost. Board members are doing it, often with less support and more scrutiny than anyone realizes.
AVPs and Deans are increasingly the most visible face of a division on a given day. Faculty on the rise, the ones a search committee will eventually notice, are already shaping a digital footprint whether anyone is coaching them on it or not.
Digital leadership runs deep into an institution, not just across the top of it. If you support any of these people, this is your work too.
Presence Was Never the Hard Part
I have spent nearly 15 years researching how campus leaders show up online, going back to a 2014 listicle of presidents to follow on Twitter. In 2016, I conducted a global study of chancellors, vice presidents, and deans to better understand their comfort, capacity, and competence on social media. That research evolved into Digital Leadership in Higher Education, which centered on two things: connection and personalization.
Could a leader show up as a real person online, rather than an inaccessible C-suite robot?
That question still matters. But it was never the whole question, and lately it has become clear that simply showing up isn’t even the hardest part. Building a presence that is intentional, sustainable, and actually doing something is.
In the current research behind this session, drawn from about 165 leaders I’ve interviewed and studied, five principles keep surfacing as the real markers of a purpose-driven digital presence:
- Connection – Is your communication building relationships, or mostly distributing information?
- Personalization – Can people recognize your values, voice, and perspective?
- Strategy – Is there a clear plan and purpose behind the presence, aligned with institutional priorities and community needs?
- Change – Can you adapt as platforms, people, and priorities shift, sometimes within weeks?
- Legacy – What is this presence building over time, for you, your institution, and the people you serve?
If you want a gut check, score your leader’s presence (or your own) from 1 to 5 on each. There’s no grade attached.
What I hear most often is that connection and personalization score highest, and strategy lags behind. That gap is the real story of where digital leadership stands in 2026.
An Institutional Branded Account and a Human Presence Are Not the Same Job
Institutional accounts are built for broad audiences, announcements, and on-brand consistency at scale. A leader’s personal presence works differently. It trades some of that scale for relationships and relevance. The personalization has to be higher touch because the communication is coming from an actual person, not a style guide.
That difference is also the risk. Connection and personalization are the secret sauce for a leader online, and they are the kryptonite. A branded account runs on an approved plan. A person wakes up with opinions, priorities, and reactions, and that shows up in what they post.
The goal isn’t to remove the human element. It’s to build enough strategy around it that the presence doesn’t sway with the day.
The Executive Support Model Matrix
Once you accept that a leader’s presence needs more than good intentions, the next useful question is where the leader, or the team behind them, sits right now. I use a simple two-axis matrix for this: execution capacity on one side (how much staff, time, or hands-on support exists to produce and publish content) and strategic ownership on the other (who is setting the vision, goals, and voice).
That gives you four quadrants:
- Independent – The leader knows their voice and goals but has few hands to help build it out. They often capture their own content, with specialized support brought in for specific tactics.
- Strategic – The leader owns the plan, and a team is fully equipped to execute it in real partnership.
- Staffed – Plenty of people producing content, but the strategy isn’t being driven by the leader. Instead, it’s institution- or team-led.
- Passive – No plan, no support. This is the accidental-presence starting point most leaders are in before any intention gets applied. Very 2015.
None of these are a bad place to be. Independent, in particular, gets an unfair reputation. A leader who knows their own voice and goals, even without a large team, is often in a stronger position than one with a full staff producing content nobody is steering.
This is also where a board member, an AVP, and a rising faculty member tend to land differently. A board member with no staff behind them is almost always Independent or Passive by default, whether anyone has named it that way or not. A rising faculty member is nearly always Independent, and often invisibly so. An AVP is frequently Staffed, supported by a division’s marketing team but rarely the one steering it.
So what do you actually do with this? Once you’ve placed your leader on the matrix, the next move follows pretty directly:
- If they’re Independent: your job is capacity, not vision. Help them capture more, faster, without taking over their voice. One dedicated hour a week of shooting or editing support usually moves more than a strategy deck would.
- If they’re Strategic: your job is protecting the system that already exists. Keep the calendar current, keep reporting monthly, and watch for scope creep before it erodes the plan.
- If they’re Staffed: your job is getting the leader back into the room. Put the short check-in on the calendar. A strategy that nobody with the actual voice has weighed in on will drift, no matter how much content ships.
- If they’re Passive: your job is one honest conversation, not a content calendar. Walk through the four-question framework below before you produce a single post.
Match the fix to the actual gap. More content isn’t the answer for a Staffed leader. More strategy isn’t the answer for an Independent one.
Access Operationalizes Personalization
If there’s one idea from this session I want to stick, it’s this: executive strategy support will fail without access.
Personalization has two sides. One is relational: strategists need to know a leader’s story, interests, and boundaries. Coffee or tea. Vans or heels. How much of their family life they’re comfortable sharing.
The other is operational: that knowledge is useless without ongoing, open communication, whether that’s through texts, a shared calendar, or literally being in the room. You cannot write in someone’s voice from a strategic plan alone. You need a live line to the actual person.
Knowing the leader makes personalization possible. Having access to them makes it sustainable.
A Simple Framework for Executive Strategy
Executives need strategy as much as they need support, and it doesn’t have to be complicated:
- Clearly define goals for the executive’s presence or accounts.
- Align strategies to pursue those goals.
- Establish tactics to enact the strategies.
- Set KPIs and data points, track them monthly, and report at least quarterly.
If you support a leader and nothing else here sticks, start by asking them to write down what they want by a specific date, and why they’re on the platform at all. Most leaders have never been asked that question directly.
Storytelling, Not Documentation
The most common failure mode I see is a leader’s account becoming a record of what event they attended last, rather than a reflection of why any of it matters. Platform and audience choices should tie back to strategic priorities, not just habit.
It’s also worth remembering that a leader’s audience is not the same as the institution’s. The people following a president on LinkedIn may be very different from those following the university, just as a leader’s Instagram audience may not reflect the students an institutional account reaches.
Segment on purpose. Ask what each platform is for and who you’re trying to reach there before you decide how much energy it deserves.
Data That Proves Relationships, Not Reach
The true ROI of a leader’s digital presence was never likes or reach. It’s relationships, and we finally have the data to show it if we look past follower counts and impressions.
Whatever you report to leadership, keep it visual, tie it back to their real priorities, and be ready for questions. Most leaders will gravitate toward the biggest numbers first, like reach and impressions, simply because those are the most visible.
Part of the job is helping them see what the smaller, more specific numbers are telling you. Who is engaging, what is resonating, where relationships are deepening, and whether the presence is actually advancing the goals you set in the first place.
Where This Leaves You
Sustainable executive social comes down to three things: a clearly defined plan and purpose, a right-sized support model instead of a borrowed one, and proof made in real time instead of after the fact.
If you want the full walkthrough, including the live audience questions on newly transitioned leaders, paid student support models, and what to report to leadership, you can find the recording and every resource shared live on the Behind the Account resource page.
And if what you’re looking for is a place for a leader’s voice, goals, and content to live and grow between sessions like this one, that’s exactly why we built the Executive Communications Studio. It doesn’t replace the strategist behind the account. It gives that strategy somewhere to keep working when you’re not in the room.
We don’t have to do this work alone. We just have to build it on purpose.
