When writing a social media strategy, you know that one of the most important things for it to achieve is to represent your brand: who you are, what you stand for, and what you do for your customers. However, what often gets forgotten, or perhaps doesn’t even cross the mind of many business owners and marketers, is that giving followers a look behind the company can be key to a powerful and engaging social media presence.

As we love to say here at Oh So, to do social media right you have to be social. The reason this works is pretty simple: people love people. Sure, they may like to see nice pictures of your products or hear about an amazing new service you’re offering, but what makes people engage far more than quality posts alone could achieve is giving them a sense of the people behind those products.

When small business owners start using social media to aid their marketing strategy they often find that they receive far more engagement on content shared on their personal profiles than they do on their business page. Why? Because people are usually more interesting than objects or impersonal businesses. When people feel that their likes or comments are communicating with a person they become far more inclined to respond as it becomes a social interaction. It all comes back to social media’s core purpose as a simple and easy way to socially interact.

It can be tricky to decide how much it is appropriate to share about the people behind your business. Perfection will often look very different depending on the company and brand. If being professional is at the core of your business, you don’t want to contradict that by being casual and sharing content that doesn’t support that image. However, if something substantial is happening to the company as a whole, your followers will love to feel as though they are a part of that. If you have a fun and personal brand but bagging sales is your key aim, you don’t want to focus on the behind-the-scenes so much that your product gets lost and you miss out on potential revenue. Find a level of sharing which means you aren’t missing out on opportunities but always maintain your brand’s reputation and tone.

In need of some inspiration? Take a look at Innocent’s social media. Innocent are no doubt at the forefront of engaging and enjoyable social content, and posting about their colleagues, the office or the company as a whole is something that regularly reinforces their social media status. They draw in their followers by offering a glimpse at what goes on behind the smoothies and manage to do so whilst completely sticking to their brand’s style and tone of voice.

Small glimpses at the people helping to make your company what it is, the environment you’re working in and any significant events can be vital for engagement, and beyond the vanity metric they can help you reach new users with something that will naturally catch their attention more than most products could.

So next time you’re at an event or something happens in the office that you think just beautifully sums up who you are as a company, get sharing. That’s what your followers want to see.