648- Why CEOs Should Own Their Digital Presence
Jens Heitland on why LinkedIn is a channel and not an asset, the risk of building CEO authority on a platform you do not own, and why every CEO should start with a personal website.
More than 80 percent of CEOs worldwide build their entire digital presence on a single platform they do not control, and most do not see the risk until the algorithm changes. A personal website is not a replacement for LinkedIn. It is the foundation that makes everything built on top of it actually yours.
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Why CEOs Should Own Their Digital Presence
There is a distinction that tends to get lost in the conversation about CEO digital presence, and it is worth being precise about. A LinkedIn profile is not an asset. It is access to a platform. The difference matters more the longer a CEO invests in building there.
The mechanics are familiar. You log into a system, create a profile, document your experience, and over time publish content that reflects your thinking. The reach is real. The engagement is real. For many executives, it is where their professional reputation lives in its most visible form. The problem is not what LinkedIn provides. The problem is the assumption that what has been built there belongs to the person who built it, and that assumption tends to go unexamined for a long time.
The content exists at the platform's discretion, not the executive who built it. The platform can restrict reach through algorithm changes without notice. Accounts can be suspended. Policies shift. What feels like stable professional infrastructure is, in structural terms, a tenancy.
What makes this worth naming is the concentration of risk it represents. Working with CEOs across different industries and company sizes, the pattern that keeps appearing is that more than 80 percent are building their entire digital authority on a single platform they do not control. The stability of LinkedIn, its scale, its ownership by Microsoft, its embeddedness in professional culture all create a sense of permanence that the underlying structure does not support.
Every CEO should own a personal website. First name, last name, dot com, or whatever the relevant domain extension is. Not as a replacement for LinkedIn, but as the foundation that makes LinkedIn less risky. The content that gets published on LinkedIn can be duplicated or expanded on a platform the CEO actually controls. Over time, that owned presence compounds in ways that rented presence cannot. Search visibility, inbound trust, and the ability to direct people to a destination that is permanently yours rather than permanently borrowed.
The practical shift this requires is small. The strategic shift in thinking is larger. LinkedIn has been the default for so long that building outside it can feel unnecessary. The reach is already there. The network is already there. The answer is that reach and ownership are different, and over a sufficiently long time horizon, the distinction becomes material.
A personal website does not generate the same immediate engagement as a LinkedIn post. It does not have the same built-in distribution. What it has is permanence, control, and the ability to serve as the center of a digital ecosystem rather than a node inside someone else's. Everything else, LinkedIn, podcast appearances, articles, and video content, can point back to it. The CEO owns the destination.
LinkedIn is a channel worth using, but not a foundation worth building on exclusively. The executives who recognize that early tend to be the ones who are not starting from zero when the algorithm changes.
Highlights:
00:00 LinkedIn Ownership Risk
00:24 Why CEOs Rely on LinkedIn
00:43 Build Your Own Platform
00:47 Start a Personal Website
00:53 Own and Duplicate Content
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Transcript :
When it comes to LinkedIn, you don't own anything because in the end you are logging into a system, creating a profile, adding your CV, and some people at least post regularly. So you have a lot of ideas that you've showcased there, and it's all fine because it's free, but in the end, they can switch you off tomorrow, the algorithm can say, "Ah, I'm not supporting you anymore." More than 80% of the total CEOs worldwide, they only focus on LinkedIn, and they don't see that there's a risk factor not being there anymore because it's stable and they trust it, it's owned by Microsoft, I get all of this, but in the end, it's not the long-term strategy. I believe every CEO needs to build something that they own. I always say start with your own personal website, first name, last name.com or dot whatever. And that will help you to offload the content that you have on LinkedIn or at least duplicate it into your own ecosystem, and then you own it because your own website, nobody can switch off