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You spent three weeks on a new social campaign. You made sure the lighting was perfect, the copy was sharp, and editing the video took forever. The best part? It only got 800 views. Then someone on your team filmed a shaky iPhone video of orders being packed and it hit 20k. It can feel frustrating, but this happens all too often.
Behind-the-scenes content consistently gets high engagement across every platform and category, and brands that understand why are using it with intention rather than treating it as an afterthought. The ones doing it well are building something very valuable: an audience that actually cares.
The deepest reason BTS content works is what you might call proof of humanity. In an era of AI-generated imagery and increasingly skeptical audiences, rawness signals trust. People don't want to buy products from actual people. When a brand pulls back the curtain on how something is made, who's making it, or what went wrong along the way, it closes the gap between brand and human. That gap is where most marketing loses people.
There's also a fandom dynamic at play that brands consistently underestimate. When audiences meet the same people on a brand's account over and over again; whether it be the founder, the warehouse team, or the person behind the camera, those people become characters. Followers start to root for them. This is the difference between having customers and having a community. It's not something you can manufacture with a content calendar. It happens when people feel like they're watching something being built in real time.
BTS content also makes audiences feel like collaborators rather than consumers. When a brand shows its product development process, responds to comments in the caption, or shares the real reason they reformulated something, it signals that the audience has a direct line in. That perceived participation is one of the most powerful loyalty drivers there is–and it turns comment sections into free market research. People tell you what they love, what surprised them, and what they want next. Brands that listen and respond close the loop in a way that no ad campaign can replicate.
And then there's the practical reality: BTS content lowers the production bar in a way that actually benefits your whole strategy. A perfectly curated feed used to be the goal, but it doesn’t work like that anymore. Brands that lean into imperfection signal confidence. The mess is the message. Posting more frequently becomes sustainable when BTS is part of the mix, and more posting means more surface area for discovery. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram reward content with high watch-through and reshare rates, and BTS earns both because curiosity is one of the most powerful human drives. People want to know what happens behind the curtain.
Here are 5 brands doing it especially well right now.
Most brands treat their team as necessary infrastructure that works together to create a cohesive social image. Beis turned their team into the content. Rather than relying solely on founder Shay Mitchell or external influencers to carry its social presence, Beis made a deliberate pivot toward employee-generated content by giving its own staff the camera and letting them document what actually goes into running a campaign. Photoshoot prep, production chaos, the moments that don't make the final cut–all of it became content. The result is a feed that feels like you're following a group of people making something happen, not a brand account. And because those faces show up consistently, audiences start to recognize them, root for them, and feel genuinely connected to the world behind the luggage. It's a playbook that works whether you have a celebrity founder or not.
Alix Earle built a months-long narrative around the launch of her skincare brand, and BTS was the engine. It started with a cryptic Instagram account called @wtfisalixdoing, which did exactly what great BTS content does: it turned the process of building something into its own piece of content. By the time the brand officially launched, fans had already been following the story for weeks. But what makes Reale Actives a genuine case study rather than just a smart influencer play is what happened after launch. The brand's team began social listening at a granular level by searching out TikToks with four views and zero comments to find real customer questions and concerns, then built content directly in response to what they found. Criticism about an ingredient was addressed with a detailed post explaining the formulation and testing. The BTS here isn't just photoshoots and packing orders; it's radical transparency about how a brand is being built and held accountable in real time.
What makes 437's BTS content work is that co-founders Hyla Nayeri and Adrien Bettio have never tried to position themselves as untouchable tastemakers. They built the brand out of a townhouse in Kingston, Ontario, didn't pay themselves for the first two years, and have been open about the messiness of that journey from the beginning. That candor has become a core part of the brand's identity. Their BTS content also shows beyond what goes into a shoot or a collection. They post videos of the design team cutting straps, hemming pants, and reshaping styles in real-time as a response to audience requests. The audience gets direct input into how the products are designed.
Revolve's BTS strategy is exciting because it doesn't come from one founder or one face, similarly to Beis, it comes from the team. Their social media and brand marketing staff document the behind-the-scenes of major moments like Revolve’s Coachella Festival in real time, sharing day-in-the-life content, office culture, and the unglamorous logistics of pulling off one of the biggest influencer events in fashion. What this does is make the brand feel like it has an interior–a real culture and a real group of people behind the polished campaigns. The buyers posting their office OOTDs, the marketing team vlogging from the desert, the social media manager leaning into relatable workplace humor. It all adds up to an audience that feels like they're following the brand from the inside. For a company whose entire growth model was built on other people's content, turning their own employees into creators is a smart and underrated move.
Strawberry Milk Mob is the purest example of BTS as a complete content strategy. Georgia Costello and her sisters, nicknamed Strawberry, Blueberry, and Coconut, built a 2.4 million-follower TikTok presence by treating their audience like friends following along on a journey to building a bikini brand. They documented everything: sewing the first bikini, packing orders from a basement, design decisions, the chaos of running a business with your siblings, and the kind of day-to-day moments that most brands would never dream of posting. The product almost becomes secondary to the story. Georgia has said she posts roughly one business-related video for every 50 lifestyle videos, and yet the brand continues to sell. Because by the time she shows you a bikini, you already know who she is, you like her, and you want her to succeed. She has mastered the art of fandom.
The brands that are winning right now aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most polished content calendars. They're the ones who've figured out that letting people in is a strategy, not a compromise.
