Posting without it eating the week

The thing that stops small businesses doing this is not ideas or skill. It is that posting daily is a job, and the person doing it already has one.

Decide a rate you can hold for a year

Twice a week, sustained, beats daily for three weeks and then nothing. Every platform's advice recommends more than you can manage, because the advice is written for people whose job this is.

For most one-person businesses the honest number is one to three posts a week, and that is enough to be findable, current and credible, which was the point.

Capture, then publish

The habit that makes this sustainable, and it separates two activities that feel like one. Capturing is free and happens during work; publishing is a scheduled task that needs no inspiration because the material already exists.

1. 01Photograph the work as you do it. Before, during, finished, the odd detail. Takes seconds and gives you everything later.
2. 02Keep one note for things customers ask, said badly and briefly. Each is a post.
3. 03Keep the thing that went wrong and what you did about it. These perform better than the successes and nobody posts them.
4. 04Once a fortnight, sit down for forty minutes, pick from what you captured, write the captions and schedule them.

What to post, concretely

• The work. The most reliable category and the most underused. People want to see the thing being done.
• The answer to a question you were asked this week.
• The process, including the unglamorous parts, which is what makes you look like a real operation.
• The thing you fixed, or got wrong, told plainly.
• The person. Not a biography: you, doing the work, visible.
• Occasionally, what you sell and how to get it. Perhaps one in five, and said plainly rather than hidden.

What to stop doing

• Quotations over a photograph of a mountain. They are what an account posts when it has nothing of its own.
• Days of the week as content, and any observance that has nothing to do with your business.
• Reposting other people's material as your main activity, which builds their presence rather than yours.
• Anything that took three hours to make. At this scale the production cost has to be near zero or the habit dies.
• Waiting until it is good enough. The photograph of the actual work, taken on a phone, outperforms the thing you did not post.

Captions

Where the forty minutes mostly goes, and it needs less than people give it. One point per post, said in the first line, because that is the part shown before anybody taps to expand.

• Start with the specific thing: what this is, where, what was wrong with it, what it cost.
• No introduction and no wind-up. The caption has one sentence of attention.
• Say the thing you would say to somebody standing next to you. That register is the one that works and it is free.
• A handful of relevant tags if the platform uses them, at the end, chosen because they describe the thing rather than because they are popular.
• Ask for something only occasionally, and when you do, say exactly what: the link, the message, the visit.

When you miss a fortnight

You will, and how you handle it decides whether this survives. The failure mode is treating the gap as a verdict: three weeks pass, posting again feels like an admission, and the account quietly stops.

Post the next thing without referring to the gap. Nobody noticed, nobody is keeping score, and an account with an occasional quiet month is indistinguishable from a busy business, which is what you are. The apology post about not posting is the only thing here that genuinely looks bad.

The posts that keep working

A few things you post will keep being found and shown long after the day you posted them, usually the ones that answer a question properly rather than the ones about this week. Those are worth more effort and worth re-posting occasionally, because almost nobody saw them the first time. Look at what is still getting attention a month later, and make more of that rather than more of what did well on the day.