The Most Underestimated "Influencers" Might Be Your Own Employees

Not long ago, a friend who runs a brand pulled me aside: "My budget is only this much," he said. "Don't I have to bet on a big-name influencer just to get people to take a look?"

Don't be in such a hurry to spend, I told him.

Start with one question:

What does "influence" even mean?

Does having more followers automatically mean you have more influence?

Not necessarily.

Every year I go through the research from SocialPubli, a platform that does nothing but influencer marketing. It's been publishing data continuously since 2018. When you line up a decade or more of its reports side by side, one thing comes through very clearly:

This industry is turning from a "mysterious art" into "a business that can be counted."

Lesson One: The small names can be more reliable than the big ones

In 2018, SocialPubli ran a global survey specifically comparing micro-influencers with top-tier influencers.

The finding was fairly counterintuitive: advertising through micro-influencers is not only cheaper — it's more authentic and more trustworthy.

Think about it. A beauty blogger with a few thousand followers earnestly talks to 3,000 people about one lipstick; a mega-influencer with tens of millions of fans lazily shouts "so good, buy it now." Whose recommendation is worth more?

In the years that followed, the data kept stacking up in that direction.

In 2019, they surveyed 150 advertising, marketing, and PR professionals across Europe and North America. Most said the money wasn't going to get cut — they'd keep putting more in.

By the 2020 edition, they'd covered professionals in 15 countries, and the conclusion was even more direct — advertisers felt influencer marketing's returns were higher than in previous years, and more of them were turning to nano- and micro-influencers to partner. Why? Because small influencers have high engagement rates.

Lesson Two: The platforms change; the rules don't

By 2022, TikTok already had more than 600 million users; by 2023, it broke 1 billion.

Gaming and esports also got a push from the pandemic, and by 2022 ad spend was heading toward $1 billion.

The platforms have kept changing, but the evidence never fell through.

In that 2023 survey, SocialPubli pointed its lens at the combination of AI and influencers — people starting to explore how to use artificial intelligence to help influencers work more smartly.

See what's happening? The question shifted from "should we spend or not" to "how do we spend more wisely." That is what maturity looks like.

Lesson Three: The "influencer" most worth mobilizing is right inside your own house

But what really made me catch my breath was the 2025 employee advocacy report.

SocialPubli offered up a number: content shared by employees can get almost 24 times more exposure than what the brand's own official accounts post.

Notice, not 2 times. 24 times.

There was also one measuring the big Spanish companies in the IBEX 35: businesses where more than half of the employees have activated LinkedIn averaged 22% higher engagement.

Let that sink in.

Your employees talk on their WeChat Moments and LinkedIn every day. They trust you, and they know a circle of people who might be interested in your product. Meanwhile, you keep paying outsiders to praise you day after day, all while forgetting these built-in "walking ads" on your own doorstep.

That, right there, is the most underrated influencer.

The 2025 TikTok Shop research carried a harder truth too: 95% of influencers want to sell products directly with brands on the TikTok Shop.

Do you see it yet? The trend is already clear — influencers are no longer just "people who speak for you"; they're becoming "people who sell for you."

Finally, do the math

So influencer marketing has evolved all these years along one road:

From "getting someone to praise you" to "making the numbers add up."

It started off betting on who had the most followers; now the race is about who can put the right content, the right platform, and the most suitable "person" in the position where they matter most.

In that arrangement, you have to get the order of the players right — the communicator closest to you, the one who trusts you most and is the handiest to use, is often not a star from outside; it's your own people.

Stop treating "influence" as a privilege reserved for the big names.

The big players are indeed depreciating; the small ones are going up.

What about you? Who are you planning to throw your budget at?