How often should a local business post?

The honest answer is less often than you have been told, and consistently rather than in bursts.

Most advice about posting frequency comes from businesses selling to consumers at national scale, where the audience is enormous and the content is the product. A roofer in Peoria is not in that situation and should not take that advice.

What posting actually does for a local business

It is not acquisition. Almost nobody discovers a local service business by scrolling past a post from a page they do not follow.

What it does is confirmation. Somebody got your name, looked you up, and needed to see a business that is trading, attended to and real. That check takes seconds and the main thing being checked is the date on the most recent post.

Once you accept that, the frequency question answers itself. You need recent, not prolific.

The actual number

Two to three a week is plenty for most local service businesses. One a week is defensible if they are good. Daily is a job you do not need.

What matters far more is that the top post is recent. Nobody counts your posts. They look at whether the latest one is from this month.

Three posts a week every week beats fifteen in one week and nothing for a month, by a wide margin, and the second pattern is what most businesses actually do.

What to post when you have nothing to say

This is the real problem. Frequency is easy, material is not.

The job you just did. Before and after, same angle, phone camera. This is the single best source and it is free.

The thing you explain constantly. Whatever you are tired of saying to customers is content. If you explain it four times a week, people want to know it.

What you are booked until. “Taking bookings from the third week of July” is useful information and signals demand without boasting.

A mistake you see. The thing people get wrong before they call you. Useful, and positions you without a sales pitch.

Weather and seasonal. Genuinely relevant for trades. The first cold week, the first storm, the start of a season.

Your team. People hire people. A photo of whoever is turning up does more than a logo.

That is six categories and most of them come from work you are already doing.

What not to post

Motivational quotes on stock backgrounds. Worse than silence. It signals that nobody is paying attention, which is the exact opposite of the point.

Anything that took an hour to write. If it is hard, you will not keep it up, and consistency is the whole value.

Six platforms at once. One or two done properly beats six abandoned. For most local businesses that is Facebook and Google, plus Instagram if the work is visual.

Apologies for the gap. Nobody noticed. Just start again.

The reason it does not happen

Not ignorance. Capacity.

Every business owner knows they should post more. What happens is that the work gets busy, posting is the thing with no deadline, and six weeks disappear. Then there is a guilty flurry, then another six weeks.

This is not a discipline failure. It is what happens when something important has no deadline and no owner.

The fixes are to batch it, so an hour on a Sunday produces three weeks of posts, to put it on somebody’s actual job description, or to pay somebody to do it.

That last one is what our posts plan is. Fifteen or thirty a month, written and scheduled, so something goes out every week whether or not you had the time. It is $149 or $299 a month and we would describe it as insurance against the gap rather than a growth strategy, because that is what it is.

The limit worth knowing

None of this generates customers. A feed is checked by people who already have your name, so it works on the margin of decisions that were mostly made elsewhere.

That makes frequency a question about effort rather than about return. The right amount is the smallest amount you can sustain forever, because the only failure mode that matters is stopping.

Three posts a week you will still be doing in eighteen months beats ten a week you abandon in March, and the second is what ambitious posting schedules usually turn into.