Insight
3 things PRs should know about the employee-influencer hybrid
Across social media, there has been a boom in fun dances to trending audio performed by shop workers, get-ready-with-me fashion clips hosted by employees of high-street brands, and corporate managers taking to LinkedIn to share personal stories from their lives that link back to their company’s product. The employee-influencer hybrid is very much alive, and experts say it is a misunderstood tool in PRs’ arsenals that many are under-using or under-valuing.
Put simply, an employee-influencer is an in-house creator: a staff member who has a regular role at a company but is also utilised as a brand content creator to promote the company and its products on social media using their own platform and personality with a high degree of creative control.
In this era of AI slop and an increased desire for human sincerity on social media, experts say that giving employees their own voice to influence customers online can be a relatable, effective way to reach new audiences and convert social media consumers to customers – though there are a few important factors to consider.
Choose the right people
When branching out into employee-influencing, PRs should ensure that the right people are being given the microphone – in terms of personality, their role within the business and depending on the platform of choice.
“Your most trusted voices are the ones that are peer groups,” says Sarah Goodall, CEO and founder of Tribal Impact, which coaches major global brands on how to harness employee influence.
“People are increasingly becoming quite insular with their trust circles. They are trusting more people like themselves or people that look like them – peers – and less trusting of [those] that are maybe on a different level to them...
“They're more credible and they bring way more to that trust network than even leaders, who people are quite sceptical of.”
That said, it is still important for executives and senior leadership to be visible: Tribal Impact’s research into 860 companies shows that when leaders post more, employees follow – and employees offer an organic reach and referral engine.
Personal branding expert Robyn Abou Chedid agrees that when C-suite executives, VPs and directors share their personalities through influencer content, it can have a positive impact on brand perception.
“Your corporate leadership represents your culture, represents your product, it represents your vision and direction and it's also going to support your employer brand,” she says.
“You're going to be attracting a lot more people, because they’re going to think: ‘That's a really nice person. They've got great ideas. They've got great visions. I really want to work for them'.”
However, Chedid agrees that there is also real benefit in including people from an organisation’s different areas.
“Personally, I would love to see a receptionist be more visible, because they're the people that see everyone come in, they see everyone's faces, they see everyone's moods – that also represents the organisation,” she says.
“So the challenge, especially with that, is people being scared to move and navigate within what the corporate standard is.”
Trust your employees, and allow them to trust the company
Handing over the reins of influence to an employee can feel like a vulnerable position for a PR or marketing team to put themselves in – and, equally, an employee can feel vulnerable when they blend their personal lives with their work and begin sharing their thoughts, personality and opinions online through a channel that’s linked to their job.
“A lot of employees come from a place of being quite frightened and scared of saying the wrong thing and the impact that will have on their role,” says Goodall, who adds that “when you can overcome that and you empower them to have an expert voice” it can become a very effective marketing tool.
“Employee influence, facilitating that expert voice and being proud of the voices that we've got behind the logo, I think works very well because you're building trust. But you can't get there unless you have a good solid cultural foundation, and employees trust each other, trust their leaders and trust the culture that they work in,” she says.
“They're not going to do it unless they feel comfortable.”
The solution, Goodall says, is “education, enablement, and building that buffer zone, that comfort zone, so people know where the boundaries are and they know what they can and can't say”.
Choose the right platform for the right purposes
Using the right platform for the right purposes is essential for effective employee-influencing, Goodall notes. The employee selected will vary depending on which platform is being utilised – and the platform of choice depends on what the goal of the content is.
She says: “If your objective is to hire more early talent into the organisation or to reach out to a new generation of customers, then probably TikTok is where you need to start creating video content. If you're in a B2B organisation where decisions take two years and you need to start influencing multiple buying communities, then LinkedIn's probably the place.”
“I always say LinkedIn is your gateway channel in a professional setting: It will instantly build your authority, that's how you're just going to get vetted,” adds Chedid.
“If you want to see more personality, it's Instagram. So I'd say those two work very much hand in hand.
“I'm also spending a lot more time on YouTube.
“Anything that I do also is very from a search intent: What are the LLMs (large language models) and AI scraping now, to create a bit more authority and understand you as an individual? And YouTube's up there, LinkedIn's quite up there, Instagram captions are quite up there, so that's also the angle I look at.
“But I always say find a way where you can show your authority, which to me is LinkedIn, but then Instagram and YouTube, you get to show so much more personality.”
