ABSTRACT: In digital disruption age, companies are heavily invested in social media to promote their brand, including Nutrifood, leading Indonesian FMCG company who currently focus on leveraging the growing influence of employee in social media. This mixed-method research combines conventional employee-based brand equity (EBE) scales with Instagram data to examine the connection between EBE and employees’ social media. The study aims to navigate employee’s role as influencer in Nutrifood by assessing brand consistent behavior, brand endorsement, brand allegiance through likert scale questionnaire and social media qualitative scoring. Quantitative scale is analyzed using PLS-SEM, consisting reflective and formative model. Reflective model shows EBE variables have strong reliability and validity, while formative model also show linear relationship between variables. Qualitative scoring analysis of 570 Instagram contents revealed that highest score is image content (53%, n=303) and lowest score is link-branding (2%, n=13). Overall, Nutrifood employees have a high baseline of consistent brand behavior on social media, but lower scores in endorsement indicate they have not explicitly expressing it. Integration of both data are sequentially processed, to vizualize, EBE integrative matrix is proposed. Employees who demonstrates high score on both EBE score are potential employee influencer, while those who score lower on both needs development plan. This matrix can help company to identify, monitor, and evaluate the extent to which employees’ actions align with the brand, which leads to increased consumer trust. It also found that EBE has shown a high level of correlation with social media activities (R2 = 0.8341) and work experience (R2 = 0.8807). Therefore, companies should regularly identify and nurture potential employee influencer among their employees. This novel measure of EBE can be adopted for other companies to navigate and leverage their employee roles as influencer in social media.

KEYWORDS:- Employee-based brand equity, employee influencer, social media, internal brand management, Instagram.