Brands that miss this shift will fall behind
Employee generated content is quickly becoming one of the most powerful and underused assets in digital marketing. Here's why your brand needs to pay attention now.
Let's be honest: UGC had its moment. For years, user-generated content was the golden child of performance marketing: authentic, cost-effective, and algorithm-friendly. Brands scrambled to source it, creators monetized it, and agencies like ours built entire service lines around it. It worked.
But something is shifting.
That shift is EGC: Employee-Generated Content. This will genuinely reshape how brands approach authenticity, trust, and content at scale over the next 18 to 24 months.
Wait, what exactly is EGC?
Employee-generated content is exactly what it sounds like: content created by the people who work at, or closely with, a brand, not paid influencers, not anonymous consumers, but the actual humans behind the logo.
Think: a sales rep sharing a behind-the-scenes office moment on LinkedIn. A customer success manager posting a video about how a product actually works from their POV. A founder going live on TikTok to answer questions directly. An HR team member posting a "day in the life" reel that accidentally goes viral because it feels so real.
That's EGC, and it's been quietly outperforming traditional UGC on several key metrics, without brands even realizing it's a strategy they could deliberately cultivate.
Watch The Influence Agency's viral EGC TikTok here
The Influence Agency's EGC video above is a strong example of effective EGC, showing that authenticity matters more than heavy curation. This happened on the spur of the moment!
The numbers speak for themselves: 160k engagements | 2,294,276 plays. All organic, nothing paid.
Why UGC alone isn't enough anymore
This doesn't mean UGC is going anywhere. UGC campaigns for clients remain a high-value content type. But the landscape has changed.
Audiences have gotten smarter. People know when a video has been seeded to a creator. They can spot the subtle tell of a gifted product review or a paid "organic" feel. The authenticity that made UGC so powerful in the first place has been diluted, not because creators aren't talented, but because the format has been commoditized.
UGC creators are essentially a freelance content marketplace now. This is great for production volume, but it means the content often lacks what audiences are actually craving: a genuine, human connection to a brand's story.
EGC fills that gap in a way UGC simply can't.
The content that performs best right now isn't the most polished; it's the most trusted. Trust lives with people, not products.
The trust economy has changed everything
We're operating in the Trust Economy. Edelman's Trust Barometer shows employees are a company's most trusted voices, outranking CEOs and media, but brands underuse them.
When employees talk about their company, there's built-in accountability. They've got skin in the game: they chose to work there. That credibility carries over, especially on LinkedIn, and is increasingly evident on TikTok and Instagram as well, where people tend to reward honesty and realness over polished production.
The strategic case for EGC in a 360° marketing plan
As agency owners, we're always thinking about how content channels interact. At The Influence Agency, we run fully integrated campaigns: influencer, social, SEO, paid, PR, content, and creative, all working together. EGC will increasingly be the connective tissue that makes it more believable.
Here's how EGC amplifies your broader strategy:
It fuels organic social without burning out your content calendar. Your team is living your brand story every day. Give them a framework to share it, and you've unlocked an always-on content engine that doesn't require a shoot budget.
It improves SEO and E-E-A-T signals. Google's emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness means that content attributed to real, named people with demonstrated expertise carries more weight. Employee bylines, LinkedIn thought leadership, and video content featuring your team all feed into this.
It de-risks paid amplification. When you put media spend behind EGC, especially through LinkedIn's Thought Leader Ads or Meta's Partnerships Ads, you're boosting content that already has inherent credibility. The conversion rates and CPAs for this type of content are frequently outperforming those of traditional brand creative for our clients right now.
It strengthens the employer brand simultaneously. Great EGC doesn't just attract customers; it attracts talent. In a competitive hiring market, showing what your culture looks like from the inside is a massive differentiator.
What's holding brands back and how to fix it
The number one thing people hear when EGC comes up is: "Our employees don't want to post about work."
That's usually a symptom of a bigger problem: either there's no clear program structure, employees are afraid of saying the wrong thing, or there simply hasn't been any investment in making it easy and safe for them to do so.
Building an EGC program isn't about asking people to become influencers. It's about creating a culture where sharing is normalized, celebrated, and occasionally rewarded, and then giving people the guardrails and the tools to do it without anxiety.
At The Influence Agency, when we build EGC strategies for clients, we start with three pillars:
1. Clarity: What can employees talk about? What's off limits? A simple internal content guide removes ambiguity and makes people more willing to participate.
2. Ease: Templates, content calendars, post suggestions. The less friction between an employee and a piece of published content, the more output you get.
3. Recognition: Celebrate the wins. When an employee's post drives real results, make it visible internally. Culture builds from what gets rewarded.
EGC isn't a hack. It's a long game, but it's one of the highest-leverage content strategies available to brands.
Where employee generated content & UGC are heading
We're at the beginning of a fundamental reordering of content trust hierarchies. The influencer model (which The Influence Agency has been deeply invested in for years) isn't going away, but it's maturing.
Micro and nano influencers gained ground because they felt closer to real people. EGC is the logical next step down that trust ladder, all the way to the source.
Platforms are already signaling this.
LinkedIn is actively pushing employee advocacy and individual thought leadership. TikTok's algorithm rewards consistency and personality over production. Meta's advertising tools increasingly favor real people over brand accounts.
The infrastructure for EGC to thrive is already being built around us. Brands that treat their employees as untapped content creators (with the right strategy, tools, and culture) will have a significant advantage in the next era of digital marketing.
Brands that don't? They'll be paying more for less attention, and wondering why their polished brand content keeps underperforming against someone's casual LinkedIn video filmed in a car.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between EGC and UGC?
UGC (User-Generated Content) is created by consumers or independent creators: people outside the brand who share their experiences, often in exchange for payment or product gifting.
EGC (Employee-Generated Content) is created by employees within the brand. Think staff, founders, and team members sharing their genuine, first-hand perspective. The key difference is accountability and proximity: employees have a direct relationship with the brand that audiences find inherently more credible.
Is EGC only relevant for B2B brands or LinkedIn?
Not at all, though LinkedIn is currently the highest-performing platform for EGC, the format is gaining significant traction on TikTok and Instagram as well. B2C brands in retail, hospitality, food and beverage, and lifestyle are seeing strong results from employee-led content that showcases culture, product knowledge, and day-to-day brand life. If anything, EGC on consumer platforms stands out more because it's still relatively rare.
Can EGC be amplified with paid media?
Absolutely, and this is where EGC becomes a serious performance play. LinkedIn's Thought Leader Ads allow brands to boost individual employee posts as sponsored content, keeping the authentic, person-first format while dramatically expanding reach. On Meta, Partnerships Ads can be used similarly.
How does EGC fit into a broader digital marketing strategy?
EGC works best as part of an integrated strategy, not a standalone channel. It feeds organic social, strengthens SEO through named authorship and E-E-A-T signals, improves paid media performance, supports PR and thought leadership, and reinforces employer brand, all simultaneously. For brands running 360° digital programs, EGC connects channels, making them feel more human and trustworthy.
Employee Generated Content: The Next Trust Advantage
UGC brought us authenticity at scale.
EGC is the next evolution, bringing trust, authority, and internal brand alignment into the content equation in a way that's extremely difficult to fake and even harder to replicate without genuine investment in your people.
If you're a brand or a marketer who's been sleeping on this, now is the time to start building your EGC strategy, before your competitors do. If you want help building it, you know where to find us!
Key Takeaways
✦ EGC (Employee Generated Content) is content created by the people who work at or closely with a brand, and it's rapidly outperforming traditional UGC in trust and engagement.
✦ UGC has become commoditized. Audiences can detect seeded and paid content, which has diluted its authenticity advantage.
✦ Employees are among the most trusted voices associated with any brand, yet most companies aren't deliberately leveraging this.
✦ EGC strengthens SEO (E-E-A-T), boosts paid media performance, and builds employer brand all at the same time.
✦ A successful EGC program is built on three pillars: Clarity (what to post), Ease (how to post), and Recognition (why to bother).
✦ Platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, and Meta are already building infrastructure that rewards EGC. The brands that move now will have a head start.