Forget Paid Ads. Activate Your People.

Hey, Paige here!

Before we get into today’s best marketing research… 

In today’s release: 

• Employee LinkedIn posts generate 5x more engagement than brand posts and outperform executives, even with 90% fewer followers

• How StoryArb’s 10-week internal competition drove $183K in pipeline and 2.5M+ impressions from employee content alone

• 63% of B2B buyers trust employee voices more than brand marketing—authenticity is winning

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DEEP DIVE

 $183,000 in new pipeline. Sounds nice, right? 

That’s what StoryArb, a B2B content agency, generated in just three weeks by activating their employees on LinkedIn through a simple competition with $5k stakes. 

No paid ads. No influencers. No brand handle doing backflips to get clicks.

Just real people, posting real things, building real attention.

Welcome to the employee-led era of LinkedIn—and if your growth strategy still hinges on corporate posts and executive thought leadership alone, you’re missing the loudest voice your brand has.

Let’s break it down.

LinkedIn has shifted—I know you feel it too

If you’re still treating LinkedIn like a PR distribution platform, you’re stuck in 2018.

LinkedIn is now a full-blown content engine. Engagement has surged +30% year-over-year, and the feed is dominated by authentic, story-driven posts from individuals—not brands.

(if you haven’t checked out #weirdlinkedin… do it. It’ll make your day. Or unnerve you. Depending on whether you fit in the community 😂)

LinkedIn’s algorithm deprioritizes company pages by design. It actively favors people. And it rewards engagement over follower count, which means your 100k follower brand page may get crushed by a junior employee with 2,000 followers and a sharp take.

“LinkedIn isn’t a business network where businesses connect. It’s a human network where humans connect.” – Tim Hughes

That quote should reshape how your marketing team thinks about social. Because increasingly, it’s your employees—not your brand—that people trust, follow, and engage with.

(but don’t worry… that trust translates.)

The data isn’t quiet. Employee posts crush it

Recent studies show exactly how tilted the field has become:

• 2.75x more impressions and 5x more engagement from employee posts than corporate ones

• Personal content receives 561% more engagement than posts from brand pages

• Follower count barely matters: employees under 5,000 followers average 0.87% engagement, while 100k+ accounts see just 0.11%

Let’s bring it to life.

StoryArb launched a 10-week internal LinkedIn competition called Own The Internet. Every employee competed to get the most impressions.

The results?

• One employee with 4,400 followers got 907,000 impressions

• The co-founder—181,000 followers—got less

• Overall company results:

  • 2.5M impressions

  • +87% engagement

  • +22% pipeline

  • $183,000 in new opps

(Check out the full breakdown here)

And it’s not just StoryArb. Gong did it. Lavender did it. Capco did it. We’ll get into those next.

But first—why is this happening?

It’s about trust, not tactics

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: B2B is still just people talking to people.

And people trust people more than brands. Always have.

• 63% of millennials and Gen Z buyers trust a peer or employee more than the company’s own ads

• Edelman calls employees “the most credible spokespeople”

• Sales cycles are increasingly influenced by dark social—Slack threads, email forwards, DMs—and that’s where employee content lives and spreads

When your engineer posts a hot take, or your SDR shares a personal story about overcoming rejection, that content travels. It gets sent around. It sparks real conversation. It wins hearts, trust, and attention.

That’s something a press release can’t do.

Real-world wins:

Gong

• Employees flooded LinkedIn with purple (onboarding posts, product launches, customer stories)

• Massive category ownership (revenue intelligence)

• Corporate page grew 10x because of employee-led traffic

• Reps reported shorter cycles due to warm, brand-aware prospects

Lavender

• Co-founders posted daily for years

• Built a mini-army of SDRs and sales coaches doing the same

• Entire team = micro-influencers in the cold email niche

• Community-led motion drove demos, brand loyalty, and recruiting

Capco

• Employee advocacy delivered 13x more conversions

• 20x higher customer sign-up rate than equivalent paid social spend

You don’t need influencers. You have them already. They’re on your payroll.

Make. It. Happen.

You don’t need to boil the ocean to start. Here’s a quick-launch playbook based on what works:

1. Run a sprint (gamify it)

StoryArb’s Own The Internet worked because it was short, competitive, and fun.
✅ 10 weeks
✅ Cash prize
✅ Leaderboard
✅ Team Slack for momentum

Do the same in your org. Call it something ridiculous. Tie a prize to impressions or traffic. Watch it explode.

2. Train your team

• Not everyone is a natural poster. That’s fine.

• Provide prompts, write sample copy, build a content buffet.

• Offer “LinkedIn Coaching Office Hours” 1x week

• Create a Slack channel where employees can share drafts, wins, and ask for ideas
  

3. Get executive buy-in

If the CEO is silent on social, employees won’t post either.

• Encourage execs to post weekly

• Celebrate employee posts in all-hands

• Normalize that building a personal brand isn’t selfish—it’s strategic
  

4. Reward the behavior

• Call out top employee posts in internal comms

• Give LinkedIn leaders internal visibility, stretch projects, or media opps

• Publicly thank them. That’s sometimes all it takes.

The question of the week

Pull your head of content, head of people, and marketing ops into a room and ask:

“If we had 50 employees posting consistently on LinkedIn, what would that do to our reach, trust, and pipeline?”

Now back it up with the data above.

Because the numbers don’t lie—and neither does your flatlining corporate page engagement.

The big takeaway: We’re entering the post-brand era of social marketing. Your brand is no longer your logo or your tagline. It’s your people—and they’re already one post away from driving your next deal.