A routine you can keep for years

What this looks like when it is working is unexciting: a small number of fixed habits, a couple of hours a month, and a decision point twice a year. Here is the whole programme.

Daily, during the work

Photograph or film what you are doing. Five minutes in total, spread through the day, and no decisions. This is the only daily commitment and it is the one that makes everything else possible.

Add to one note anything a customer asked that surprised you. Each is a post, and the note is also the most useful document in the business for other reasons.

Once or twice a day, briefly

• Check comments and messages. Reply to the genuine ones, ignore the rest, and leave.
• Not scrolling. The distinction matters: twenty minutes of checking becomes an hour of consumption, and the hour produces nothing.

Every fortnight, forty minutes

1. 01Look at what you captured and pick the four or six worth posting.
2. 02Write the captions. Short, specific, one point each.
3. 03Schedule them across the next two weeks at your chosen rate.
4. 04Note anything missing so you can capture it in the coming fortnight.

That is the production process. Twenty-six sessions a year, and nothing on any individual day except capture.

Monthly, ten minutes

1. 01Your three best and three worst posts, by saves and shares rather than by likes.
2. 02Enquiries and list signups attributable to this.
3. 03One thing to do more of and one to stop.

Twice a year, half an hour

1. 01Is this producing enquiries, customers or list growth. Numbers, not impressions of numbers.
2. 02Is the rate still sustainable, or have you been quietly missing it for two months.
3. 03Is this still the right platform, given where the conversation has moved.
4. 04Continue, change, or stop. All three are legitimate, and stopping deliberately is better than fading out.

Roughly two hours a month plus the capture habit. That is a realistic social media programme for a business with no social media person, and it is considerably more likely to still be running in two years than anything more ambitious.

When you are too busy

The honest contingency, because the busy weeks are exactly when this gets dropped and the dropping is what ends it.

Keep the capture, which costs seconds, and let the posting rate fall. Two posts a month from material you already have is a maintained account. What you should not do is stop capturing, because that is what makes returning expensive: a fortnight with no material means the next session has nothing to work with and the habit does not restart.

Somebody else doing the capture

The part of this that delegates well, and the part people try to delegate last. Anybody doing the work can photograph it; what they cannot do is write in your voice or decide what the business says.

So split it there. They capture, you choose and write. It costs them seconds a day and it removes the bottleneck that actually kills this, which is one person needing to be in the right place with a phone. Tell them what you want: the work, the detail, the before, the mess, and nothing staged.

Keeping the material somewhere

The small logistical thing that makes the fortnightly session possible: one folder, on the phone or synchronised from it, where the photographs and clips go. Not the camera roll mixed with everything else, which is where material goes to be never found again. Five minutes to set up, and it is the difference between a scheduling session that takes forty minutes and one that takes two hours of scrolling.

What to do after a year of this

Read back your own posts. You will see what you kept returning to, which is usually a clearer statement of what the business is about than anything on your site, and you will see which things produced enquiries. Both are worth carrying over into how you describe yourself everywhere else. A year of posts is also a year of material you can reuse, since almost nobody saw any individual one.