Creator marketing is all the rage right now, as you probably know. Everyone's suddenly realizing what we've been saying for ages: Personal brand, storytelling, an actual reason to follow you — that's where great brands are built.
We say it so much we've started to sound like a broken record, even to ourselves.
But Buffer took the whole idea one step further. Instead of just making content, they turned their employees into creators in their own right, and the results are pretty astounding.
- 88% of the team actively participating
- 21,000 posts published
- 22M collective reach and 40M collective views
- Earned media value: $600,000
If you’ve ever tried to run an employee advocacy program, you know how hard it is to get employees to even post, let alone rack up millions in impressions.
Meanwhile, the team at Buffer is landing brand deals, getting invited on podcasts, and gaining followers who show up for them. While they're building their own names, they're also telling the story of Buffer.
Buffer calls it the Team of Creators, and it's the brainchild of Sabreen Haziq, who leads brand and creator strategy at Buffer. She walked us through the playbook: how they built it, why it works, and what you can steal.
A social media company with no social media manager
Buffer (a company whose product helps marketers publish content) doesn't have a single person responsible for publishing all of its own content. Yep, you read that right.
Rather than being the company's content producer, the marketing team became its content coach, helping everyone else create and then boosting what they published.
"It's not just that the content team produces content. Everybody creates content," Sabreen says. "We are orchestrators. We help bring them to the forefront."
A marketing team can only create so much content on its own. But expertise exists throughout the organization.
Every week, customer success managers solve problems worth documenting, engineers uncover new product use cases, finance leaders make strategic decisions, and recruiters develop perspectives on hiring and culture.
A team of creators vs. employee advocacy
Buffer intentionally built their Team of Creators programs differently than traditional employee advocacy programs.
Traditional employee advocacy asks employees to amplify the company's message. Share this post. Comment on this announcement. Help increase reach.
Buffer instead encourages employees to build their own voices.
That's why someone in finance can publish about overcoming the fear of posting on LinkedIn. Someone in customer advocacy can share an experiment they ran using AI to improve customer responses. Someone else can write about leadership, remote work, or even cats. (That's not a marketing acronym. Like, actual cats.)
You can see the range of posting from recruiting, software, and product teammates in recent posts:
The expectation isn't that everyone talks about Buffer.
It's that everyone becomes known for something.
Unlike a lot of the employee advocacy programs, we want you to be a creator. You could talk about cats consistently for 7 days a week if that's what you're passionate about. We don't expect you to talk about Buffer.
The creator OS: a 4-stage system to build your own Team of Creators
Many companies have tried some version of employee advocacy and found it hard to sustain. Buffer avoided that fate by building systems instead of relying on enthusiasm. 4 of them, to be exact.
Stage 1: Model
Buy-in among your team always starts at the top.
Here’s what that looks like at Buffer:
- CEO Joel Gascoigne models the behavior himself, making public writing a visible part of leadership rather than something delegated entirely to marketing.
- It’s a named company bet — and is included as a company priority in all-hands.
- Managers reinforce it. Team of Creators comes up in monthly reflections as part of each person's development.
- Hiring supports it. Buffer screens for people who already love its culture of sharing; many arrive as longtime followers of its content.
All of these are reasons Buffer’s approach feels more deeply engrained into its culture than a marketing campaign to run for Q3.
Stage 2: Equip
One of the first exercises Sabreen walks new creators through is identifying 3 content pillars:
- 1 topic that comes naturally.
- 1 they'd like to become known for.
- 1 that's simply fun.
She compares it to finding the right “size.” The goal is to find the intersection of what you already know, what you're curious to explore, and what you'll genuinely enjoy talking about. That exercise gives creators a place to start instead of staring at a blank LinkedIn page wondering what to write.
Stage 3: Signal
One of Buffer’s smartest moves is codifying a system for spotting great ideas in the moment, starting with their Slack channel.
The company uses a TOC Slack emoji (short for Team of Creators) to spot insightful observations or proof points that would turn into a great post.
Stage 4: Amplify
Most advocacy programs start with "help us get more reach." That's where they go wrong.
Buffer instead uses its brand to help teammates build their own.
Sabreen illustrated it with a hypothetical any marketing leader can appreciate. If HubSpot ran this program, the message wouldn't be "we need everyone posting on LinkedIn." It would be:
"HubSpot has incredible brand equity. We want to share that digital real estate with the people who work here. If you talk about your work — 'I built an AI workflow to help me with my lead scoring system within HubSpot' — we would recognize that, we would amplify that, we would spotlight you. And the brand equity you get from HubSpot will stay with you even beyond this season of life."
In practice at Buffer, that looks like:
- Collaborator posts instead of reposts. Content lives on the employee's account; Buffer joins as a collaborator, so both audiences see it.
- Strong posts get amplified and celebrated by the company.
- Equity that outlasts the role. The professional reputation employees build is theirs to keep.
When people feel like they're building something that's theirs, they keep creating. And over time, those authentic voices build the one thing corporate channels rarely can: trust.
Why Buffer's content engine is so difficult to copy
While the Team of Creators approach looks like a content strategy on the surface, it’s also a smart product strategy.
When teammates publish using Buffer, they experience the platform the same way customers do. They discover friction, uncover feature gaps, and develop a deeper understanding of the people they're building for.
Creating content becomes another form of product research.
“Our moat very much is that by becoming creators ourselves, we become better at building for the people we serve,” explains Sabreen.
In the end, Buffer built an expertise engine. And that's a much harder advantage for competitors to copy, and a much more scalable one for marketing leaders trying to do more with less.
FAQ
How do I get executives to participate without it feeling forced or becoming a ghostwriting operation?
Buffer's model works because CEO Joel Gascoigne creates publicly as a genuine habit — not because someone on the marketing team writes posts under his name.
That doesn't mean executives have to do it alone. Sabreen's team regularly sits with teammates 1-on-1, helping them uncover the idea that's already there and shape it into their own words.
The behavior is reinforced beyond marketing, too. Managers bring up Team of Creators during monthly 1-on-1 reflections — not as a quota check, but as part of each person's professional development.
How do you measure this before the results compound?
Don’t measure a creator program like a paid campaign.
The first 90 days can be deceptively quiet.
After the initial spike that comes with any new program, the signal Sabreen watches for is whether the same people keep creating month after month — not whether the launch generated buzz. Sustained output from the same creators, long after the novelty wears off, is what separates a habit from a campaign.
Early on, the metrics that matter are participation rate, consistency, and internal momentum. Business metrics like earned media value and pipeline influence come later.
What happens when employees build audiences and then leave?
Buffer designed the program with that reality in mind. Employees keep the brand equity they build — and that's intentional. It's the value proposition that makes people genuinely want to participate.
The value for Buffer isn't owning the audience. It's creating a lasting association between credible voices and the Buffer brand.
There's a hiring benefit, too. Many new teammates arrive as longtime followers of Buffer's creators, meaning today's creators often become tomorrow's recruiting advantage.
