Why Boring Brands Win At Social (Eventually)

Are you afraid the industry your company works in is too boring to succeed on social media?

“Boring” brands often assume their work isn’t exciting enough to attract attention in the way popular brands are able to. However, this is a common misconception, one that can be rectified with a bit of hard work and creativity.

In this post, we share tips on how brands who work in boring industries can liven up their social media strategies.

What is a boring brand?

A “boring” brand is a brand whose work consists of topics and tasks that likely wouldn’t interest the general public. It can also be defined as a brand whose work primarily consists of long hours spent performing tasks that aren’t interesting to watch.

Examples include accounting firms who primarily work with financial reports, manufacturers who produce the same products in the same way everyday, security firms who work in relatively safe areas, etc.

Why boring brands struggle with social media

There are several reasons why brands who work in fields the general public would find boring at the surface level have difficulty finding their place on social media.

Because these brands work in industries that have long periods of nothing exciting happening, they find it difficult to market themselves on platforms that are built around visual content, especially platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram that thrive on short-form videos and captivating photos.

A brand’s subject matter might even feel too technical to talk about on social media, a medium in which people are trained to scroll the second they become uninterested in a photo or video.

If videos that involve you sharing information about a topic in your industry don’t perform well, they require a different approach.

People are interested in learning about things they don’t understand or have never heard about before, but it needs to be done in an interesting way.

You need to focus more on telling stories and less on explaining facts. You know the reason why people should be excited about what you’re telling them. Your job as a social media creator is to communicate the facts in a way that gets them excited about the topic you’re discussing.

Take creator Elle Cordova as a fantastic example of how to turn a “boring” topic like grammar into comedy gold.

She creates content on multiple platforms but receives most of her engagements on YouTube and TikTok.

Her video comparing different fonts by embodying the “personalities” of those fonts received 9.9 million views on YouTube and 7.2 million views on TikTok.

It’s also important that you humanize your brand. Focus less on acting like a professional in your industry and more on letting a personality transcend through the screen.

Give your audience something to get attached to. It’ll have them wanting more, not less.

Finally, some industries grow at a slow pace. This means it has long periods where no news or current events happen, which can make it difficult for brands to come up with topic ideas.

How to make your boring brand succeed at social media

Hire a social media expert or become one

It’s very difficult to become good at something you know nothing about. Even brands in exciting industries who don’t know the first thing about social media struggle because they don’t know the ins and outs of the platforms they’re uploading to.

So, your first task should be to hire a social media expert if you have the budget for it or become the expert yourself.

If you choose to hire an expert, keep in mind that they’ll be in charge of creating content for an industry that’s hard to make content for. This means you’re going to need to hire someone incredibly talented.

If you don’t have the budget to hire someone, you’re going to need to take it upon yourself to become familiar with the platforms you want to upload to.

Each one has its own features and unwritten rules that dictate how content should be created for it and which content styles are popular at the moment.

The best way to figure all of this out for yourself is to use the platforms you want to upload to. Create personal accounts for each, and get to scrolling.

The hardest part about this is determining which social media platforms you should focus on.

Normally, we recommend brands to search for topics related to their industry to see which platforms content shows up on. This lets them know their target audience is already on that platform.

However, boring brands might belong to industries that aren’t on social media. In this case, try starting out with popular platforms like Instagram and TikTok. They thrive on short-form content and photos, and you can always cross-post to other platforms.

A social media scheduling tool makes it incredibly easy to cross-post to multiple platforms from a single draft.

Also, because your industry might be quite professional, don’t rule out LinkedIn as a suitable social media platform.

Whatever platforms you choose, be sure to familiarize yourself with them before you upload content to them.

Choose a spokesperson

This is the most important step in your strategy. Your spokesperson is the person who will be in charge of presenting content.

Remember, brands fail at social media when they fail to humanize their image. Therefore, we highly recommend choosing someone who knows a lot about your industry rather than hiring an actor.

A lot of social media personalities are lively, bright and maybe even a little funny, but you don’t necessarily need to present content with a lot of energy to succeed on social media.

Again, you just need someone who’s a great communicator and interesting to listen to.

If you work with more than one person, you probably already know who your spokesperson should be. Think of someone in your company who presents ideas in a captivating way. Someone everyone listens to when they talk.

If your company lacks this type of person, once again, you’re going to have to become it yourself.

You can even choose more than one spokesperson or have the whole company take part in creating content for the brand.

Choose a target audience

This is another important step toward building a solid social media strategy.

If you don’t know who your target audience is, you’ll be creating content for no one and everyone at the same time. If you know exactly who you’re trying to attract with your content, you’ll be able to turn viewers into leads.

Which reminds me, your goals for social media should play a role in helping you decide who your target audience should be.

There are two primary options you can choose:

Broad: The general public who might be interested in learning about your industry if facts are presented in an interesting way.
Niche: People who are in your industry or adjacent industries.

Social media is pretty forgiving when it comes to targeting broad audiences. This is due to the way social media algorithms are designed to work, making it easier for eccentric topics to gain traction.

Here are a few things to consider: it’s hard to get noticed when you target a broad audience, but if you do get noticed, your viral videos will receive more engagements.

A niche audience is easier to target, but that audience is likely a lot smaller, so your content won’t get as many engagements.

As for your social media goals, target a niche audience if you want to turn your followers into customers.

While a broad audience may be interested in learning about your industry, they’re much less likely to be interested enough to become customers.

Expect to play the long game

If your industry is boring or too niche, prepare yourself for the possibility that it might take you a really long time before you find your audience on social media.

This is okay.

As long as you know the importance of your industry, and you communicate that importance with informative, engaging content that educates and entertains, you’ll eventually find an audience that appreciates your authenticity and your ability to present “boring” information and tasks in an interesting way.

Jump on trends and current events that relate to your industry

This is one of the most important techniques you can use as a brand that works in a boring industry or performs boring tasks.

It’s always important for you to discuss current events in your industry, but it’s vital that you act fast if those news topics leave your industry and jump over to general news.

Before social media, the general public had to rely on second-hand reports from journalists, who often rephrased facts to fit a narrative they were trying to craft.

Thanks to social media, the public can now hear those facts straight from the source. This could be you!

This is something geneticist @dr.cal.ur.science.pal does a lot on TikTok.

For example, she created a TikTok explaining how scientists were able to bioengineer a genome for the dire wolf, a long-extinct species.

The video received over 8 million views on TikTok.

This is because not only does Dr. Cal present a topic that was extremely relevant at the time and related to an incredibly popular franchise (Jurassic Park), she presents it in just over two minutes in a way that’s easy to understand.

Plus, she works while talking to the camera, which is off to the side of her working environment. This (talking to the camera while performing other tasks) is a common social media filming style that’s highly effective at keeping an audience engaged.

Final thoughts

The idea that boring brands can’t win on social media is a misconception.

It isn’t true.

And what’s boring is subjective. It means different things to different people.

But that’s not to say that winning on social media is easy. It’s not easy for any brand.

So, follow the advice we discussed above. It’ll give you a significant head start.

Then, keep going. Because Rome wasn’t built in a day.

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