What to post when you have no time to post
The problem is never ideas. It is that the moment for posting is always the busiest moment of the day.
The short version
Make a dozen posts in one sitting from photographs you already have, keep them in a folder, and post one a week. Consistency matters more than volume, and a quiet account is worse than a slow one.
Almost every local business social account follows the same arc. Three weeks of enthusiasm, a gap, a guilty post apologising for the gap, then silence.
It is not a discipline problem. Posting asks you to be creative at exactly the times you are least able to be - mid-job, mid-service, at the end of a long day. The fix is to stop trying to post in the moment, and make the posts in advance instead.
Make a dozen at once
Batching means making all your social media posts for the next few months in one sitting. Sit down once, with the photographs already on your phone, and make twelve. Not twelve ideas - twelve finished posts, captions written, sitting in a folder ready to go.
Twelve is about three months at one a week. That is long enough to be worth the sitting and short enough that the photographs still look current. An hour or two gets it done.
Then posting is no longer a creative act. It is picking the next one out of a folder, which is something you can do in a queue.
What the twelve posts are
A good batch for a local business is mostly your own work, with a few faces, answers and practical notices mixed in. A rough mix that suits most businesses:
- Four of the work. The finished job, the plate, the cut, the installed boiler. This is the bulk and the most useful.
- Two before-and-afters. Among the easiest things a trade can post, as long as you remember the before.
- Two of people. You, your staff, someone at work. Faces get attention: a Georgia Tech study of 1.1 million Instagram photos found those with a face were 38% more likely to be liked and 32% more likely to get comments.
- Two answering a question you get asked constantly. How long does it take, do you cover my area, do I need to book.
- One review, screenshotted, with a thank you. If you are short of them, asking for reviews is easier than it feels.
- One practical notice - hours over a holiday, a new service, where to park.
Notice what is not in there: motivational quotes, national days, stock photographs and anything any business in the country could have posted. Those fill a calendar and do nothing.
Original photographs also matter to the platforms. Instagram says an account that mainly posts content it did not create or meaningfully edit may not be recommended to new audiences. Your own photographs of your own work are original by definition.
Getting the photographs without a photographer
Most local businesses already have enough photographs for a batch, badly filed. Start there before you buy anything.
- Take the before shot. The single habit that improves a trade’s social account more than any other. It costs three seconds and you cannot go back for it.
- Shoot in daylight, near a window or outside, and turn the flash off.
- Tidy the frame, not the whole room. Move the bag, the mug and the cable out of shot.
- Take five, keep one. Storage is cheap and your first attempt is rarely your best.
- Ask before posting customers, their homes or their children - always, and get it in writing where you can.
Try this now
Make a folder on your phone called Work and put every usable photograph in it as you take it. Most of the batching hour is spent searching for photographs; the folder removes that.
The same folder feeds your Google Business Profile, which also looks better with a few recent photographs every month.
Keeping it going
Posting on a fixed day each week is a system. Posting whenever you remember is not.
Consistency is also what the numbers reward. Buffer’s analysis of more than 100,000 accounts over 26 weeks found that people who posted in 20 or more of those weeks got 450% more engagement per post than people who posted in four weeks or fewer. Buffer sells scheduling software, so read it as one company’s data, but the direction matches common sense: an account that shows up every week gets seen.
Put a repeating reminder somewhere you will see it, post from the folder, and do the batching sitting again when you are down to your last three. If a week gets away from you, post the next one late rather than skipping. The gap only matters once it becomes a habit.
Keep the profile itself in order too. A good profile with weekly posts beats a thin profile with daily ones, because the profile is what people actually land on.
A few common questions.
How far ahead should I schedule posts?
Making them ahead matters more than scheduling them. A folder of finished posts you send by hand is easier to keep current than a scheduler full of posts written before the season changed, and it means a genuinely good photograph can jump the queue.
How often should a local business post?
Once a week is a sensible floor, and the important part is keeping it up. Buffer's study of more than 100,000 accounts found that posting in most weeks brought far more engagement per post than posting in bursts. Pick a rhythm you can hold for a year.
Is it worth paying someone to run my social media?
It depends what they are being paid for. Photography and a batch of posts is a job with a beginning and an end, and often good value. A monthly retainer to post generic content on your behalf usually is not, because the posts that work are the ones only you can take.
What if I have nothing to post?
Then answer a question. The five things customers ask you on the phone every week are five posts, and they are more useful than anything else you could put up. They also tend to reach people who are actually deciding.
Should I post the same thing on every platform?
Mostly yes, at this scale. The audience overlap for a local business is small and nobody is annoyed by seeing your finished bathroom twice. Adjust the caption length and move on rather than making different content for each.
