People want to hear from your warehouse team more than your CEO. The gap is 16% to 9%.
Sprout Social asked people who they actually want to hear from on a brand's social account.
Frontline employees: 16%. Executives: 9%.
Your CEO's thought leadership is losing to the person who packs the boxes. And honestly, that tracks.
The full picture is worth reading twice. 40% want educational content about the products and services. 27% want community-focused, connection-building posts. The two things brands spend the most effort on — executive positioning and campaign creative — barely register.
The case FOR putting your team on camera:
Specificity. A warehouse lead explaining why the packaging changed is more convincing than any brand statement about sustainability, because she knows what she's talking about
It's an enormous, untapped content supply. You have twelve interesting people and you're using none of them
It answers the AI-slop problem structurally. A named human with a job is the one thing that can't be generated
The case AGAINST:
Risk. Once someone becomes the face, they carry brand exposure they didn't sign up for and can't be trained out of
Attrition. You build an audience around Marcus in ops, then Marcus takes a better job in April
Not everyone wants this. Being visibly online is unpaid emotional labour if you're not careful about it, and "voluntary" gets murky when your manager asks
Execs aren't useless — B2B buying committees do want to hear a point of view from leadership. It's a channel-fit question, not a hierarchy question
Where we land: the credibility is distributed through the company, and almost all of it is below the leadership team.
Practically: find the three people who genuinely light up talking about the work. Pay them for it, properly, as part of the role rather than a favour. Give them latitude on what they say. Protect them when a comment section turns.
And drop the idea that the most senior person is the most interesting one. Seniority correlates with distance from the actual work, and the actual work is what people want to see.
Who's the most compelling person at your company who has never appeared on your social? Genuinely — go find out what they'd say.
