Posting Three Times and Stopping

The shape of the failure

It is remarkably consistent.

A page is created, three or four posts appear over a week or two, and then nothing for two years.

Which happens because the initial burst is powered by novelty and the plan was set during a quiet week.

Then a busy month arrives, posting is the first thing dropped, and restarting after a gap feels awkward enough that it does not happen.

Why the plan was wrong

Almost always because the frequency was chosen aspirationally.

Daily posting is recommended widely, and it is advice written for businesses with somebody employed to do it.

A trade working forty-five hours on site will not post daily, and setting that as the plan guarantees failure within a month.

The correct test: what would you still do in your busiest week of the year, when something has gone wrong on site and you are behind?

Whatever survives that test is your actual frequency, and it is usually fortnightly or monthly.

What makes it sustainable

• Content from work you are already doing, rather than created separately.
• A frequency you would keep when busy.
• A fixed moment, attached to something else in the week.
• A low standard, deliberately.
• Permission to skip without abandoning.

The fourth matters more than it sounds. A page requiring a well-composed photograph and carefully written copy will not be updated; one requiring a phone photograph and two sentences will.

A worked example

A trade business that had started a page three times and abandoned it three times.

The fourth attempt worked, and the difference was mechanical rather than motivational.

They took a photograph on every job as part of finishing up, which was already happening for their own records.

Once a fortnight, on the day they did their invoicing, they posted one of those photographs with two sentences about the job.

It attached posting to something that already happened reliably, and it used material that already existed.

Two years later it was still running, and they had never once sat down to think about what to post.

Attaching it to something existing

The mechanism that makes a habit survive.

A new habit standing alone requires remembering. One attached to an existing routine does not.

Invoicing day, the Friday afternoon paperwork hour, or the end of a job.

Which converts posting from something to remember into a step within something already happening.

That is the whole of the technique, and it is more effective than any amount of resolve.

The gap and how to handle it

Gaps happen and the way they are handled decides whether the page survives.

The instinct after two months of silence is to apologise, explain, or restart with a substantial post.

All three make the gap into an event and raise the cost of returning.

What works is simply posting again, as though nothing happened, because nobody noticed and nobody is keeping score.

A page with an occasional gap and a long history reads as a real business. One that stopped two years ago does not.

Building a small stock in advance

The one preparation worth doing, and it removes most of the pressure.

Keep a folder of photographs from finished jobs, added to whenever one is taken.

Which means that on posting day there is always something available, rather than a decision about what to post from nothing.

Four or five in reserve is enough to cover a busy month or a run of jobs that photograph badly.

The folder is the whole system. Everything else is choosing one and typing two sentences.

What kills a posting habit is arriving at the moment with nothing prepared, and a folder removes that permanently.

The counter-case

Where frequent posting is warranted.

A business whose customers genuinely follow it for content, such as a shop announcing stock or a venue with events.

Anything time-sensitive, where the point is telling people something now.

A business where somebody's role includes this, and the capacity is genuine rather than assumed.

And a period of deliberate effort with a defined end, such as a campaign, which is different from a permanent commitment.

Two sentences is enough

Worth stating explicitly, since the length of a post is where people talk themselves out of making one.

A photograph of finished work and a sentence saying what it was and where does the job.

Nobody is reading a business page for prose, and a long post is less likely to be read than a short one.

Which means the writing is not the obstacle it feels like: what took twenty minutes of drafting could have been thirty seconds of typing.

Naming the town is worth doing every time, since it is the detail that makes a post useful to somebody deciding whether you work in their area.

What frequency actually achieves

Worth being realistic, since the advice to post constantly implies a return that is rarely there.

For a local trade, a page is not usually a source of enquiries in volume.

What it does: confirms the business exists and is active when somebody checks, gives people who were recommended you something to look at, and occasionally produces work through a local group.

Which are all served by fortnightly posting and not much improved by daily posting.

The difference between fortnightly and never is large. The difference between fortnightly and daily is small, for this kind of business.

Batching

An alternative to a regular rhythm, and it suits some people considerably better.

Rather than posting fortnightly, sit down once a quarter and write six posts at once, then schedule them.

Which concentrates the effort into a single hour rather than spreading it, and removes the fortnightly decision entirely.

The trade-off is that scheduled posts cannot respond to anything current, so they need to be things that are true whenever they appear.

Job photographs, seasonal advice and common questions all work that way; anything about this week does not.

For a business that finds regular small tasks harder than occasional larger ones, this is the better arrangement.

Setting it up

1. Decide what you would post in your busiest week.
2. Set that as the frequency.
3. Attach it to an existing routine.
4. Take photographs as part of finishing jobs.
5. Lower the standard deliberately.
6. Resume after gaps without comment.

The first is the whole decision, and answering it honestly usually produces a lower number than anybody wants, which is precisely the reason the resulting plan actually survives.

Which platform to do this on is covered in being on one network rather than five.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.