This autumn we wrote more than 800 social media posts for the businesses whose social we run, and nearly 600 of them are approved and scheduled through to the end of the year. Getting there taught us more about what makes social media work for a local business than any strategy document. Here’s what we learned, names left out.
1. Consistency beats volume
We settled on around eight posts a week per business: something useful every weekday morning, and a campaign post three afternoons a week. Just as important is what we didn’t fill. Two afternoons and the weekend are deliberately left empty, because that’s where the things you can’t plan go: a new delivery, a match result, a sunny Saturday.
A calendar with no gaps leaves no room for the posts that feel most alive.
2. Plan far enough ahead that you notice repeats
A weekday morning slot uses more than twenty ideas a month. Plan a month at a time and you’ll find yourself posting the same idea in October that you posted in September. Each business we work with now has a bank of around 45 different content briefs, and the calendar works through them so an idea doesn’t come round again for months.
We got that rotation wrong three times before it was right. The first version started every month in the same place. The second overlapped consecutive months by more than half. The lesson we keep relearning: check the actual calendar, not the plan for it. Every wrong version looked fine on paper.
3. Never trust a filename
Design files are usually named after the template they came from, not what’s on them. On our first pass for one business, matching artwork to posts by filename got four out of eight wrong. A file called “How it works” was something else entirely.
Now every piece of artwork is looked at by a person, all of it laid out on one sheet, before it goes anywhere near a post.
4. Look at every design before it goes out
That habit has caught things that would have been embarrassing, or worse, on a live feed:
- artwork showing the wrong phone number and address for the business;
- designs with placeholder text still on them, like “[AREA]” and “add a genuine customer review here”;
- templates with impressive-looking statistics nobody could back up, which under UK consumer law you can’t publish anyway.
None of them were anyone’s fault. They’re what templates look like before they’re finished. They’re only a problem if nobody looks.
5. Get facts from the source, not from memory
For businesses that post about events and fixtures, the dates, times and prices now come straight from the organiser’s own listings rather than being typed in. That also means nothing gets posted about an event that has already happened. We check that before a month goes live.
Where a supplier brand requires its approved posts to go out word for word, they do, exactly as supplied. Where a phone number or price appears on a design we make, it comes from one master record, so it can’t drift out of date.
6. Nothing goes out without a person saying yes
Every post is written and scheduled well ahead, and none of it publishes until someone has approved it. It sounds obvious. It’s also the single most important rule we have, because it’s the difference between a mistake on a planning sheet and a mistake on a client’s public page.
For businesses in regulated industries, like betting or financial advice, there’s a second check: posts that break the rules for that industry are stopped automatically before they can publish.
7. Instagram won’t schedule itself
Facebook has scheduling built in. Instagram, for most business accounts, effectively doesn’t, so something has to publish every post at the right moment. Whatever you use, make sure it can’t post the same thing twice if it hiccups. That’s the one failure your followers will definitely notice.
If you run your own social
- Pick a rhythm you can keep for a year, not a month, and leave gaps for the unplanned.
- Keep a bank of ideas bigger than a month’s worth, and track what you’ve used.
- Look at every image before it goes out, on a phone, at the size people will see it.
- Keep your phone number, prices and address in one place, and copy them from there every time.
- Have someone other than the author check anything going out.
Or let us plan, write, design and publish it for you. That’s our content and social service, and you see everything before it goes out. Talk to us about your social.
Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.
Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.
