What to Post When Nothing Happened

What people reach for and should not

When nothing has happened, the instinct is to post something generic.

A motivational quote. A comment on the weather. A stock image with the day of the week on it. A national day for something unrelated to the business.

All of those are recognisable as filler, and posting filler is worse than posting nothing, because it teaches people that your page contains nothing worth reading.

The material that works is already in your head and does not feel like content, which is why it gets overlooked.

What you already know

• A question customers ask repeatedly, answered properly.
• Something you noticed on a job, good or bad.
• A seasonal warning relevant to the next month.
• A mistake people make that costs them money.
• How long something actually takes.
• What a thing costs, roughly, and why it varies.

The first is the most reliable and the least used. Every trade has five questions asked on nearly every job, and each is a post.

Why this material works

Because it is genuinely useful and nobody else is posting it.

Everybody can post a quote. Only somebody who does the work can say that a particular common problem is usually caused by something people would not guess.

Which means the posts are distinctive by default, without any effort to be interesting.

They also demonstrate competence more effectively than any claim to it, because explaining something clearly is evidence of understanding it.

And they get shared occasionally, which generic content does not.

A worked example

A trade business that had run out of finished work to photograph during a quiet period.

Rather than skipping, they posted about a problem they had seen three times that month, what causes it, and what it costs to fix if left.

It received considerably more response than any of their job photographs had.

Two people commented that they had the same thing, one of whom became a customer.

What made it work was that it was specific, seasonal and useful, and it took four minutes to write because they already knew all of it.

They kept a note of the questions they were asked from then on, and stopped ever running out.

Keeping a list

The mechanism that prevents this problem entirely.

Whenever a customer asks something, write it down. A note on a phone is sufficient.

Within a month there will be fifteen entries, which is more than a year of fortnightly posts.

Each one is a post that writes itself, because you have already answered it out loud several times.

The same list is also the basis for a good frequently-asked page on your website, which is a larger return from the same effort.

Answering something publicly that was asked privately

A habit worth forming, and it doubles the value of every enquiry.

Somebody messages asking whether you do a particular thing, or what something costs.

Answer them, then post the same answer publicly a few days later, without identifying anybody.

Because if one person asked, others wondered and did not ask, and the public version reaches them.

It also demonstrates that messages get answered, which is a signal worth sending to anybody considering making contact.

The seasonal calendar

Worth writing once and reusing every year.

Every trade has a rhythm: what people should check before winter, what fails in the first cold snap, what needs doing in spring.

Which means a list of twelve seasonal posts, one per month, can be written in an afternoon and reused annually with light updating.

That is not lazy, since the advice is equally true each year and most people did not see it last time.

It also means posting day never arrives with nothing available.

Showing the unglamorous part

An underused category and one that performs unexpectedly well.

Finished work looks good and looks like every other business posting finished work.

The part nobody posts is the middle: what was found when something was opened up, why a job took longer than expected, what the problem actually was.

Which is more interesting, more distinctive, and considerably more persuasive, because it shows the work rather than the result.

It also sets expectations usefully, since somebody who has seen what is involved is less likely to be surprised by a quote.

The constraint is permission, and anything identifying a property or a customer needs it.

The counter-case

Where posting nothing is right.

A genuinely quiet period where forcing something produces filler, and skipping a fortnight costs nothing.

Any moment where posting would be inappropriate, such as during a local incident or a wider event that makes ordinary business content jarring.

And a page whose audience is small enough that the effort is better spent elsewhere, which is a legitimate conclusion.

Skipping is always better than filler, and the point of a list is that skipping is rarely necessary.

What not to post

Worth naming, since these are common and each does small damage.

Anything requiring people to like or share to enter something, which most platforms discourage and which attracts an audience that will never buy anything.

Political commentary, unless the business is genuinely about that, since it divides an audience you built for other reasons.

Complaints about customers, which are read by future customers.

Anything identifying a customer or their property without permission, which is a genuine problem rather than a matter of taste.

And anything the business would not say to somebody's face, which is a reliable test for the whole category.

Recommending other trades

A category that costs nothing and returns more than it appears to.

Posting that a particular electrician, supplier or shop is worth using is useful to the audience and costs you nothing.

It also tends to be reciprocated, which is how local referral networks actually form.

And it positions the business as somebody who knows the trade locally rather than somebody advertising into it.

The constraint is meaning it, since recommending somebody who then disappoints reflects on you.

Which means recommending only people you have actually used, and keeping the list short.

Building the list

1. Note every question customers ask, for a month.
2. Write twelve seasonal posts in one afternoon.
3. Keep both in one place.
4. Use one whenever there is no photograph.
5. Add to the list whenever something comes up.
6. Skip rather than post filler.

The first two together remove the problem permanently, and they cost an afternoon and a month of paying attention.

What to do with the same material on your site is covered in the page that answers the awkward question.

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.