Most small business social media dies from the daily decision. Posting is not hard; deciding what to post, every single day, while running a business, is what kills it.
Batching removes the decision. Plan once a month, capture material as you go, and the daily task becomes posting rather than inventing.
- 1
Pick four content pillars
Four recurring themes covering what you want to be known for. For a trade: finished work, work in progress, useful advice, the people. Everything you post should fit one. Four is enough for variety without the paralysis of unlimited choice.
- 2
Set a realistic frequency
Three posts a week you can sustain beats daily for a fortnight then silence. Decide the number you will still manage in your busiest month and plan for that. Consistency is what the platforms reward and what audiences notice.
- 3
Build a repeating weekly pattern
Assign pillars to days: Monday finished work, Wednesday advice, Friday behind the scenes. The pattern does the deciding for you. It also stops the drift into only ever posting finished jobs, which is where most business accounts end up.
- 4
Harvest material from work you already do
Every job produces before and after photos, a problem solved, a question answered, a mistake avoided. Take pictures as you work rather than trying to reconstruct them later. Ninety per cent of your content already exists — it is being thrown away.
- 5
Write a month in one session
With the pattern set and the material collected, write all twelve or so posts in one sitting. Writing in a batch is dramatically faster than one a day, and the voice stays consistent. Draft into a document, not directly into the platform.
- 6
Schedule everything, leave gaps for reality
Use the platform’s own scheduler or a tool. Leave a couple of slots empty each week for something timely — a job that went unusually well, a question worth answering. A fully scheduled month with no room to react reads like a broadcast.
- 7
Review one number at the end of the month
Pick a single metric that matters to your business: enquiries mentioning social, profile clicks, saves. Not likes. Look at which pillar produced it and weight next month accordingly. One number reviewed monthly beats a dashboard nobody opens.
Which platforms
One done properly beats four done badly. Choose where your customers actually are, not where you are comfortable. For most local trades and services that is Facebook or Instagram; for B2B it is usually LinkedIn.
On repeating yourself
You will feel repetitive long before your audience does. Only a fraction of followers see any given post. Reworking a good post two months later is normal practice, not laziness.
Frequently asked questions
Two to three hours once the pillars and pattern are set. The first month takes longer because you are building the system rather than using it.
Would rather we did it?
These guides are here so you can do it yourself. If you would rather hand it over, that is what we do.
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