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 batch of a dozen posts in one sitting from photographs you already have, keep them in a folder, and post one a week. 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.
Make a dozen at once
Sit down once, with the photographs already on your phone, and make twelve posts. Not twelve ideas - twelve finished posts, with their captions written, sitting in a folder ready to go.
Twelve is about three months at one a week, which 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 not 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 are
A rough mix that works for most local 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. The highest-performing thing most trades can post, and the easiest to shoot if you remember the before.
- Two of people. You, your staff, someone at work. Faces outperform everything.
- Two answering a question you get asked constantly. How long does it take, what does it cost, do you cover my area.
- One review, screenshotted, with a thank you.
- 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 that could have been posted by any business in the country. Those fill a calendar and do nothing.
Getting the photographs without a photographer
You almost certainly have enough already, 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 free 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. The batching hour is ninety per cent searching for photographs; this removes it.
Keeping it going
One a week, at a time you have chosen, is a system. Whenever you remember is not.
Put a repeating reminder somewhere you will see it, post from the folder, and do the batching sitting again when you get 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.
And keep the profile itself in order. A good profile with monthly 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 manually 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.
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 - 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.
