Employees increasingly use social media not just for private purposes but also to present themselves in a professional context. The celebrity status of employees such as professional athletes in team sports, CEOs, researchers or university professors can be valuable to employing organizations as they too benefit from their employees’ social media presence through better performance and enhanced reputation. However, there is also a cost of employees’ social media activities to an organization. For example, it can lead to higher labor costs due to the increased bargaining power of employees. The social media effort can take away resources from their job and cause internal conflicts with other employees. There can also be brand image and reputation conflicts between employee and employer. This study analyzes the effects of employees’ social media activity on their employers’ costs and revenues using cross-sectional data from different football clubs from the big 5 leagues in Europe. The athletes are employees and celebrities at once who work in a team and transform publicity into revenues. We find that social media activities of star players increase their clubs’ commercial revenues but also result in significantly higher staff costs. For all other players in a team, those two effects were negative. Employers may get what they pay for because a positive association exists between paid salaries and revenues through social media.