A client said something to me this month that I hear all the time. “Instagram is for restaurants and fashion. We are boring. We have nothing to photograph.” They do unglamorous work, the kind nobody thinks of as pretty. And they were completely sure it was not for them.
I did not believe them. So instead of arguing, I asked for one month to test it.
My theory
Every business has something worth showing. It is almost never the product sitting on a white background. It is the people, the process, the small human moments that customers never normally get to see. People do not follow a business on Instagram to see a catalog. They follow to feel like they know the people behind it.
So we were not going to post product shots. We were going to show the business being a business.
What we actually posted
- The team doing the actual work, mid-task, not posing
- Behind the scenes of how a thing gets made or done, the messy real version
- The little wins and normal moments of a workday
- Customers, with their permission, actually happy with what they got
None of it was polished. Some of it I shot on a phone in bad light. That turned out to be fine, because it looked real, and real is what works here.
What happened
The “boring” account was not boring at all once we stopped trying to sell and started trying to show. The behind-the-scenes posts did the best by far. People commented things like “I had no idea this is how you make that.” Turns out the everyday reality of the business was interesting to everyone except the people who lived it every day and had gone blind to it.
What I told the client
There is no such thing as a business with nothing to show. There is only a business that has stopped noticing what is interesting about itself. The test proved it in a month. Now they cannot stop finding things to post. My job was mostly just to get them to point the camera at the stuff they thought was too ordinary to matter.
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