By the Numbers: These are the media personalities that Fortune 500 CEOs follow most

PR isn’t always about reaching the public in a broad sense. Often, it’s about reaching just a few of the most influential of all people – like a Fortune 500 CEO.

“On any given brand, on any given topic, it’s relatively small groups of people that are influencing public opinion,” explained Collin Berglund, managing director at Rational 360. “And one of the major groups that we see influencing public opinion the most right now are executives of big companies. Part of the reason for that is they are amplifying their voices directly to different audiences in their own way. A lot of them have their own podcasts. They are more active on social media than they’ve ever been, and executive voices are performing better online than (brand) voices typically. So that makes them more able to influence online reputation on a number of different issues.”

That trend inspired Rational 360 to take a deep dive into who influences the most powerful executives in the country. After all, if you can identify who these leaders listen to, you can better refine your own pitching and get targeted messages in front of precisely the right audience.

“This list provides one input into a prioritization strategy for clients,” Berglund said. “If you want to be reaching a group of executives, these are the reporters that are worth your time to be building relationships with, because their audience includes a lot of key executives.”

To accomplish this, Rational 360 scraped social data from X, where 100 Fortune 500 CEOs have an account. They then identified the accounts of media personalities they follow most, using the concept of “could someone pitch a story to this figure?” to determine who should make the list. For instance, even if every account followed @whitehouse, they can’ t be pitched, and thus wouldn’t make the cut.

Here’s what they found:

1. Jim Cramer, CNBC: Followed by 36% of CEOs
2. Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times and CNBC: Followed by 24% of CEOs
3. Kara Swisher, Vox Media: Followed by 22% of CEOs
4. David Faber, CNBC: Followed by 19% of CEOs
5. Emily Chang, Bloomberg: Followed by 18% of CEOs
6. Brian Sozzi, Yahoo Finance: Followed by 17% of CEOs
7. Julia Chatterley, CNN, followed by 15% of CEOs
8. Becky Quick, CNBC, followed by 14% of CEOs
9. TIE: Jon Fortt and Sara Eisen, both CNBC, followed by 13% of CEOs
10. TIE: Carl Quintanilla, CNBC, and Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC, followed by 12% of CEOs
11. Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, followed by 11% of CEOs
12. TIE: Dan Primack (Axios) and Maria Bartiromo (Fox Business), followed by 10% of CEOs

Download the full report and see all 70 names here.

The most popular news sources followed by executives were CNBC (15 mentions), The New York Times (11), Bloomberg (7) and CNN (6).

It’s unsurprising, of course, that many of these personalities are focused on business news. But what did stand out to Berglund about the list was how many of the personalities have invested heavily in building their own media brands.

“They are often working on supplemental products that are online products that reach different discrete audiences,” he explained. “Andrew Ross Sorkin is the second person on the list, he’s obviously at the New York Times, but also writes DealBook, an actual online newsletter. Our suspicion is that’s really the primary reason he’s on here is because of the online newsletter more so than his traditional role at the New York Times. We think that really a lot of the folks on here have kind of built themselves into brands that are reaching these CEOs directly.”

The other surprise for Berglund was how U.S.-centric most of the journalists were – 90% of the figures on the list primarily create content about the United States. But as business continues to globalize, he anticipates a shift toward executives following more international figures rather than only consuming news from an American perspective.

Berglund noted that this approach could be applied to other key audiences besides executives to better understand and target their media influences.

“Others are looking for, who are the media figures influencing this key committee in Congress. Others are looking at who’s influencing a broader set of influencers around their brand. So, this type of approach can be leveraged, not just for CEOs, but for a number of different objectives that different organizations have.”