What is employee generated content, and how do you start?
Short answer
Employee generated content is content published by employees from their own profiles, in their own voice, rather than reshared brand posts. It outperforms company page content because LinkedIn distributes personal posts through commenters' networks and readers trust a named person over a logo. It works when it starts with three people who already have audiences.
Employee generated content is anything published by the people who work at a company, from their own profiles, in their own voice. Not resharing brand posts. Not approved snippets. Their observations about the work.
It performs better than page content for a boring structural reason. LinkedIn distributes a personal post through the commenters' networks, and readers extend more trust to a named human than to a logo. Same claim, different messenger, different result.
Which content formats hold up over time?
- The specific observation. One thing that happened this week and what it changed. Short, unrepeatable by a competitor, and impossible to write with a template.
- The working note. How your team actually does something, including the part that is annoying. Engineers and support people write these best and rarely think anyone cares.
- The disagreement. A widely repeated claim in your industry that your own data contradicts. Highest reach, highest risk, worth doing once a month.
Why do company wide launches fail?
The standard rollout announces a program, invites everyone, provides a content library and reports on total shares. Three months later a handful of people are still posting and the reporting quietly stops.
The two fixable causes are that participation was voluntary, so the people with the largest audiences opted out, and that the burden of writing stayed with the employee, who has a full time job already.
What does a working first month look like?
- 1Rank your employees by visible LinkedIn audience and take the top three. Not volunteers, not the leadership team, the measured top three.
- 2Book fifteen minutes a week with each. Record it. You are mining raw material, not coaching.
- 3Write their drafts. They edit for voice and press publish. Ownership stays with them, effort stays with you.
- 4Reply to every comment within the hour, from their profile. This is where the conversations start.
- 5Report per person after four weeks: posts, followers gained, replies, DMs, conversations opened. Then add a fourth person.
| Approach | Who publishes | Typical month three outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Company wide launch | Anyone who volunteers | Participation collapses to two or three people |
| Top ten by reach | The employees with existing audiences | A habit with measurable replies per person |
Where should you start?
Everything above depends on knowing who your top three actually are, and LinkedIn gives you no ranking of your own employees by audience. That is the gap Invisible Reach fills at Invisible Keyboard: one report with the ten largest LinkedIn audiences inside a company, ranked, with profile links and combined reach.
A content library does not create a habit. Someone writing the first draft does.
Frequently asked questions
- How is employee generated content different from employee advocacy?
- Advocacy usually means resharing company content. Employee generated content means the employee writes something original in their own voice, which is what audiences respond to.
- How many employees do you need for this to work?
- Three, provided they are the three with the largest existing audiences. Company wide launches produce more posts and less reach.