How "boring" businesses are winning on social

"We're not really a social media business."

We hear this constantly.

Maybe you're an accountant. An insurance broker. A manufacturer. A recruitment agency. A construction firm. You sell industrial equipment, commercial cleaning contracts, or software that does something genuinely important but isn't exactly going to set TikTok alight.

Fair enough.

Except your industry isn't boring. Your content might be.

The brands winning on social right now aren't the ones with the most exciting products. They're the ones who've worked out how to turn what they do into an idea worth watching. That's a completely different skill.

You don't need an exciting product to make exciting content

There's a weird assumption floating around that social media only belongs to brands selling trainers, skincare, food or holidays, the stuff that photographs itself.

Some of the best content online right now comes from businesses you'd never expect.

Take Ramp, a corporate expense management platform. On paper: software that processes receipts and expense reports. Not exactly a TikTok trend waiting to happen.

So Ramp hired Brian Baumgartner, Kevin from The Office, and put him in a glass box in the middle of Manhattan doing expense reports by hand. Live. For hours. Right next to a sign explaining that Ramp's software does the same job instantly. Then Andy Buckley, who played CFO David Wallace on the same show, saw the flyers calling Kevin "the new CFO" and posted a video pretending to be offended. Ramp replied within a day. That response became their most-engaged organic video, and the whole stunt pulled in over 100 million views.

People watched it because it was funny, because it used a show they already loved, and because the joke landed on a real pain point: doing expense reports by hand is genuinely miserable. Ramp didn't invent an exciting product. They found an exciting way to make fun of a boring problem.

Then there's Grillo's Pickles. A pickle company. One of the least "content-friendly" categories going.

Grillo's built its Instagram on memes and relatable reels rather than product shots, and then something better happened. People kept complaining, publicly, about the jar. The lid was near-impossible to open. The juice leaked everywhere. One customer with neuropathy said opening it actually hurt. Instead of ignoring the noise, Grillo's read every comment, redesigned the lid with their packaging partner, and launched a new twist-off jar. When they announced it, the replies were things like "finally I can stop opening the jars in the sink."

This is a company treating its comment section like a focus group, and getting a real product win out of it.

Then there's Kinso, an AI inbox tool that unifies your emails, Slack, WhatsApp and LinkedIn messages in one place. Objectively, "unified inbox software" is not a thrilling premise.

Kinso's TikTok doesn't try to make inbox management look thrilling. It goes behind the scenes instead: videos like "how my bosses started a company focused on one thing" and "POV: marketing team can't read a room (our poor engineers)." It's mockumentary-style, a bit self-deprecating, and funny about what it's actually like inside a small startup. You don't need to know what Kinso does to enjoy watching it.

Each one just found a better way to talk about what they already do.

The product isn't the idea

This is where most businesses trip up.

They start with the product.

"What can we post about our product?"

So an accountant posts about tax deadlines. An estate agent posts another photo of a house. A recruiter posts a job vacancy. A manufacturer posts a photo of a machine. A software company posts a screenshot of its newest feature.

Technically, that's content.

Is it something anyone wants to watch? Not really.

The brands that stand out start somewhere else entirely. They start with an idea. The product is just the subject matter that gives them something to talk about.

Look at the difference.

An industrial business could post: "We manufacture high-quality components for the automotive industry."

Or it could ask: "What happens when a £2 part fails on a £2 million machine?"

Same industry. Same expertise. Completely different piece of content.

An accountant could post: "5 tax tips for small businesses."

Or: "The five financial decisions we see business owners make that keep us up at night."

Same expertise. Much better hook.

The product is your starting point. Your idea is something else entirely.

So what actually makes a "boring" business interesting?

Usually, it comes down to one of four things.

1. They find the weird stuff

Every industry has things that feel completely normal to the people inside it and fascinating to everyone else: the strange sights, the ridiculous customer questions, the things people always get wrong, the stuff you'd never think to mention because it's just Tuesday for you.

Grillo's didn't set out to make packaging content. They paid attention to what customers were actually saying and turned it into something worth acting on.

Your team probably thinks "everyone already knows that." They don't.

2. They make the complicated simple

Expertise gets interesting the moment it's translated into something people can actually follow: a story, an analogy, an opinion, a useful insight. You don't need to dumb anything down. You need to make people care.

Good test: could someone with zero knowledge of your industry understand why this is interesting? If yes, you're onto something.

3. They have a point of view

Social media is full of brands saying the safe thing. Very few of them have anything to say.

Ramp could have made a straightforward explainer about expense software. Instead they made a comedy bit about how painful expense reports are, and let the joke do the talking.

Having a point of view means being willing to say "this is what we believe," "here's what everyone gets wrong," or "here's what nobody tells you about our industry." You don't have to be controversial. You just have to mean it.

That's personality. Personality is interesting.

4. They let people see behind the curtain

Sometimes the most interesting thing about a business is simply the people in it. What does a normal day look like? What's surprisingly difficult? Who are the characters?

Kinso built an entire content strategy around this. Their product is genuinely hard to make visually interesting (it's inbox software), so instead they show you the founders, the engineers, the in-jokes. People are naturally nosy about things they don't normally get to see, and almost every business has access to that.

You don't need a £20,000 production budget. You need someone willing to press record.

Stop asking "what should we post?"

One of the biggest shifts a business can make is changing the question.

Instead of "what should we post this week," ask: "what's an idea we could make people care about?"

Small change. Completely changes the process.

Once you've got the idea, the format sorts itself out. It might become a TikTok. A Reel. A LinkedIn post. A carousel. A recurring series. A street interview. A reaction video. A podcast clip. A meme.

The format is secondary. The idea comes first.

You don't have to become a comedy account

One important distinction. "Make boring businesses interesting" doesn't mean every brand needs to start dancing on TikTok or chasing every trend going. That's just a different kind of painful.

A serious business doesn't need to pretend to be something it isn't. A law firm can still be authoritative. An engineering firm can still be technical, and a financial business can still be professional while having a personality online.

Ramp's stunt worked because it was properly funny and it used a pain point every finance team recognises. Kinso's founders are still building serious software; they're just letting you watch them do it. The goal is to find the interesting parts of the brand you already have, not to invent a new one.

Great social should feel like your business's personality turned up a notch, not a completely different company wearing a TikTok costume.

Find the story hiding inside your business

If you think your business is "too boring" for social, try this.

Forget your products and services for five minutes. Ask instead:

• What's the strangest thing about our industry?
• What do customers always get wrong?
• What questions do we get asked constantly?
• What do insiders know that nobody else does?
• What do we have a strong opinion about?
• What's the most ridiculous thing that's ever happened to us?
• What would surprise someone who knows nothing about our industry?
• What do our competitors all say that we disagree with?
• What happens behind the scenes that nobody ever sees?
• What could we talk about for ten minutes without needing a sales deck?

Somewhere in those answers is a good piece of content.

And if there isn't? Keep digging until you find a better idea. It's in there somewhere.

There's no such thing as a boring business

The biggest mistake a "boring" business can make on social isn't being boring. It's assuming it has to be.

Ramp, Grillo's and Kinso aren't winning because their products suddenly became fascinating. They're winning because someone looked at something ordinary, expense reports, pickle jars, a shared inbox, and thought there had to be a better way to talk about it.

That's the job. Take the familiar and make people look twice. Take something technical and make it understandable. Take something ordinary and find the story. Take something boring and find the idea.

Social media doesn't care whether you sell trainers or steel. It cares whether you've given someone a reason to stop scrolling.

There's no such thing as a boring business when you've got a great idea.

Think your business is too boring for social? We'd love to prove you wrong.