Employee-Generated Content (EGC)
EGC is content that employees create themselves, in their own words, about their actual work, rather than content the marketing team makes and hands to employees to post. It comes from the employee's own voice and experience, not the brand's.
What it actually is
Employee-Generated Content is content created and shared by a company's employees, not by the brand's marketing department. That's the whole definition, and the part people skip past is "created by." The employee is the author. They picked the topic, wrote the take, decided what was worth saying.
A sales rep writing a post about a deal that fell apart and what they learned from it: that's EGC. A sales rep hitting "repost" on the company's quarterly announcement: that's not.
Why it matters if you sell
If you're in B2B sales or sit near revenue, this distinction is the difference between content that builds your name and content that builds nobody's name. EGC works because it's specific and personal. It's a person describing a real objection they heard on a call, a mistake they made in a pitch, a framework they use to qualify leads. That specificity is exactly what a brand account can't produce, because a brand doesn't have a Tuesday.
The employees who do this well end up with pipelines that don't run through the brand page at all. Buyers follow people, not logos, and EGC is the mechanism by which a person becomes worth following.
The misconception
Most companies think they're running an EGC program when they're actually running an advocacy program. Advocacy is employees resharing brand-made assets: the company blog post, the product announcement, the recruiting video. It's useful for reach. It is not EGC, and it doesn't produce the same trust.
The tell is simple: if marketing wrote it and an employee is just the distribution channel, it's advocacy. If the employee wrote it, in language nobody else on the team would have used, it's EGC. Brands that conflate the two end up with a feed full of identical reshares and wonder why engagement is flat. It's flat because everyone's voice sounds like the brand's.
How it's actually used
You can't template EGC the way you template advocacy content. What you can do is give employees real material: wins, losses, objections, tools, opinions, and get out of the way on tone. The measure isn't "did they post," it's "could you tell who wrote this without checking the name." If every post in your EGC program reads the same, you haven't built EGC. You've built advocacy with extra steps.
Related
Stop guessing what to post on LinkedIn.
SignalPosts turns your sales calls into posts that sound like the person sending them.
Get started