Social Media for Your Business: The Ten Questions I Get Asked Most
Straight answers, from forty years of doing this.
Almost every business owner I sit down with asks me some version of the same ten questions about social media. The answers are less complicated than the industry would have you believe, so here they are without the jargon.
1. How often should you really be posting on Social Media?
Less often than you have been told, and far more consistently.
Three considered posts a week will beat ten thrown together, every time. The algorithm does not reward volume for its own sake — it rewards posts people stop for. Ten weak posts simply teach the platform that your audience scrolls past you.
The number that matters is the one you can maintain in twelve months’ time when the business is busy and nobody feels like filming anything. Pick that number, then hold it. A business that posts twice a week for a year is in a stronger position than one that posted daily for six weeks and then went quiet.
Jess Cook somes it up in this post How Often Should You Really Be Posting on Social Media
2. Which platforms should we actually be on?
The ones your customers are on, and no more than two of them properly.
If you sell to other businesses — trades, professional services, industrial, B2B of any kind — LinkedIn and Facebook will do most of the work. If you sell to consumers and the product looks good, Instagram earns its place. TikTok is worth it only if you will genuinely commit to video, which most businesses will not.
Being mediocre on five platforms is worse than being good on one. Every additional account is another thing to feed, another set of messages going unanswered, and another dead-looking page for a prospect to find.
3. What do we put on them?
Stop thinking about posts and start thinking about proof.
The content that works for a local business is nearly always one of five things: the work you have just finished, a customer saying you did it well, the person who does the work, something useful you know that your customer does not, or a piece of news the business has earned.
Photograph the job before it leaves the yard. Film the thirty seconds where you explain the thing you explain to every customer. Ask the happy client for two sentences. That is a content calendar, and it costs nothing but the habit.
What does not work: motivational quotes, stock photography, public holiday graphics, and anything that could belong to any business in Australia.
4. Is organic still worth doing, or do we have to pay?
Both, doing different jobs.
Organic social media is not a lead generation channel any more and has not been one for years. Its job now is credibility. When someone hears your name, gets a referral, or sees your ad, they look you up. A page that is active, current and clearly run by real people closes that check. A page whose last post was in 2023 opens a doubt.
Paid social is where the reach lives. The good news for a local business is that it is still remarkably cheap — a modest weekly budget aimed at a tight radius around Ipswich or your part of Brisbane goes a very long way compared to almost any other advertising you can buy.
Run organic for trust. Pay for reach. Do not expect either to do the other’s job.
5. Does it matter what time we post?
Far less than people think, and it is the wrong thing to worry about.
The platforms will show a good post to more people whenever it goes up. A weak post at the perfect hour is still a weak post. Spend the energy you were going to spend on scheduling theory on making one of the posts better.
If you want a rule: business hours on a weekday, and look at your own analytics after a couple of months rather than a blog post about somebody else’s audience.
6. Do I have to be on camera?
You do not have to be. But it works better when you are.
For any business where the owner is the reason people buy — trades, consultants, agencies, professional services, anything sold on trust — the single strongest piece of content you can make is you, talking to camera, answering a question a customer actually asked you. Not a script read to camera. The answer you would give across the counter.
It is uncomfortable for the first few. It stops being uncomfortable at about the tenth. Nothing else you can post will build recognition as quickly in a local market.
7. What should we be measuring?
Enquiries. Then, a long way behind, everything else.
Likes and follower counts are the numbers agencies report when they have nothing better to show you. The ones worth watching are reach, saves and shares — which tell you whether the content is any good — and messages, calls, form submissions and website sessions, which tell you whether it is doing anything for the business.
Ask one question at the end of every month: what did this bring in? If nobody can answer it, that is the finding.
8. How long before it works?
Three months before you can read the pattern. Six before it is doing real work.
Paid social will tell you something within a fortnight. Organic is slower, because what you are building is familiarity, and familiarity accumulates. Most businesses give up at week seven, right before the point where it starts compounding.
If you are not prepared to commit six months, put the money into paid advertising instead and leave organic alone. Half-done is the most expensive version.
9. Should we do it in-house or outsource it?
It depends on which part.
The raw material — the photographs, the job on site, the thirty seconds of you explaining something — has to come from inside the business. Nobody outside it can manufacture that, and any agency that tells you otherwise is about to send you stock images.
The strategy, the writing, the design, the ad management and the discipline of actually publishing are all better outsourced, because they are skills and they take time you do not have. The usual mistake is handing the whole thing to whoever in the office is youngest, on the assumption that being on social media personally is the same as running it commercially. It is not, any more than driving a car qualifies you to run a fleet.
10. What is the biggest mistake you see?
Starting.
Not starting badly — just starting, without deciding what any of it is for. An account gets opened, a few posts go up, the enthusiasm runs out, and the page sits there half-finished where every prospective customer can see it.
Decide what the social media is meant to achieve first. Usually it is one of two things: to make you look established when someone checks, or to bring in enquiries. Those need different content and different budgets. Almost every failed business page I have looked at was trying to do both by accident and neither on purpose.
The short version
Two platforms, done properly. Three posts a week you can sustain. Real work, real people, real proof. A modest paid budget aimed tightly at your own patch. Measure enquiries. Give it six months.
That is the whole of it, and it is entirely doable in a day a week.
Peter Brown runs 1 Day Marketing, a fractional marketing department for businesses across Ipswich and Greater Brisbane. Forty years in advertising and marketing, one day a week per client, and a deliberate maximum of three clients at any one time.
If your social media has been half-finished for a while, a single day is usually enough to work out what it should be doing.
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