Community Giveaway: Share your smartest social move of the year!

We almost always use text overlays in our reels and video content, and recently we’ve begun using more controversial phrases. We’re in travel, so using sentences like “why would I ever want to visit [insert location]” as the hook and then following it with a bunch of great b-roll has worked well for us in stirring conversation and shares.

Using trending audio is one of the easiest ways we see automatic engagement on our videos. 

Best way we boosted engagement is by sharing in-person event pictures we have hosted or participated in. Being a fully remote company, the event photos show that our employees are still able to attend in-person events and bring together the collaboration of our employees, clients, and partners. 

Reels are the way to go! Also incorporating as much UGC as possible!!

We started putting more of an emphasis on data, making data carousels, sharing data stories, and finding ways to highlight data in everything we do. Not only is it a great way to showcase ourselves as a data nonprofit, our audience loves them. We see folks sharing and citing our data now regularly. Folks love a bar graph and pie chart!

We use a spin on our firm name and a world-famous reality show brand to highlight internal updates that always get 30%+ higher than average click rates.  It’s fun, which sets us apart from the traditional industry messaging, yet the content is current, relevant and engaging enough for audience interaction.  

As a nonprofit that focuses on very niche research topics, our content tends to be very text heavy. We use snapshots of key data insights and infographics as visuals to really draw our users in and boost engagement. 30-second videos summarizing somewhat complex findings also do the trick.

I go out of my way to pitch ideas, nurture relationships, and network as much as I can. I’ve been able to make great connections that will really help jumpstart my community and career and all I can think of is just treat others with kindness and respect. People in the industry want to feel heard and important so I do everything in my power to try to make others feel that way. Whether it’s in creating reels, replying to comments, commenting. reposting, following accounts and offering services, I go above and beyond to engage.

My organization has historically not used Stories much on either Facebook or Instagram, so this year I’ve been making a consistent effort to push more of that content. We’re still figuring out what works best for us and what our audience wants to see in our Stories, but I have already started to see engagement improving.

Something our team has been doing more recently is using testimonies from visitors, artists, and stakeholders to prioritize storytelling and boost engagement!

Working in higher ed, we’ve had great success in shared posts with student organizations, especially for videos. We also tag people and groups as much as we can, and we encouraged our audience to spread the word by tagging in the comments. There is something uplifting about your seeing yourself mentioned in a brand post, even if it’s just your university

Employee Generated Content!! Our community loves seeing the faces behind the brand. We’ve gotten creative with hopping on trends and showing behind the scenes moments that gets our audience excited to learn more about us and purchase from us.

Our entire messaging has changed, so this year has really been about finding our way in an entirely new environment. We are trying to better utilize our in house talent though through animation and illustrations. 

So, ours actually starts next week. We wound down the monthly Twitter chat we had been hosting since March 2016 that has had multiple academic medical papers written about it and even presented a poster / abstract at one of the large oncology conferences and it are launching as a podcast. With nine plus years of data, we know the timing is not only right, but we have a wealth of content we can draw upon to develop episodes (I have three years planned out already) and since it will also be recorded on video, I’ll use the content from these episodes across all social channels.

I’m tired just thinking about it.

There has been a really big focus on engagement recently and I’ve created videos with fun and catchy text overlay such as “Accidentally Summer shopped at” or “places to shop for someone who says don’t get me anything” and they’ve done really well. People love to see different stores (in a mall) and what makes them all different from each other but also ideas of what to get from those stores when you don’t really get a chance to check them out. I’m very proud of the increase in engagement the past few weeks. 

We work with a healthcare insurance brand, and we started weekly mental health posts that have increased engagement exponentially. They started on Facebook and Instagram, and the response was so great that we added them to LinkedIn with an employer twist. We also use a branded hashtag for some editorial flare. We’ve had a few with thousands (!!!) of shares. 

We take our most popular evergreen organic posts and run them as engagement ads. I rotate through the content depending on seasonal and trending topics. It’s a great way to keep the older content that was really good alive! Even better: different variations of our visual style have changed slightly throughout the years, and I’ve found that some generations of creative succeed in different demographics than others.

My smartest social move of 2025 was taking our (Riskonnect’s) customer video clips from the past 3 years for our various SaaS technology solutions and creating solution montage videos via putting the clips from customers that cover the same solution together. 

The way that those solution-oriented Customer Montage Videos really answered every question that a prospect could potentially have - just through the stories that these customers shared has been so effective, both for our Global Social Program with our #CustomerSpotlight video series and for our Sales folks. 

It was really something for our brand where I went back to the idea table and said ‘what can we do in 2025 with video using existing content, that we’ve never done before on social media.’

Also, as a positive result of all the customer montage videos that I’ve edited in 2025 - I now have a list of our top customer brands top-of-mind at any given moment. We now do a lot on LinkedIn with those brands in terms of interacting with each other and supporting each other’s content. 

Here’s an example of one of these from Riskonnect’s YouTube channel, just in case this idea is something another SMM would want to test out for their brand: 

During the national high-five day, we did a short-form video of my CEO and colleagues doing a “high-five” and that generated a lot of reach and impressions! 

In the last year, something I’d consider a smart move is leaning into our well known employee’s when in need of an engagement booster. Bell Bank is well known in Fargo ND, compared to our growth markets and at our HQ branch we have a lovely receptionist named Roxy. She is so loved! She’s also known for wearing themed cardigans around the holidays. Last year during the 4th of July, I posted a photo of her wearing a red, white and blue cardigan and engagement was through the roof! At our midwest branches, we also serve cookies so when it was national cookie day, we did a post of her serving up cookies and our audience loved it!

In addition, our audience loves seeing company related posts of us having a great time showing our culture. Typically these type of posts are multi photo posts, but most recently I have switched up the format by using capcut to create slideshows of our pictures. It’s allowed me to leverage video across our platforms since that is a growing form of media.