Social media for businesses that don't have time to do it properly

Planning what goes out, scheduling and publishing it, answering the comments and messages that come back, and reporting on what it produced. In practice that's a content calendar approved a month ahead, consistent posting across your chosen platforms, active community management, and a monthly report on reach, engagement and enquiries.

Management is the ongoing running of your channels — planning, posting, replying, reporting. Content creation is the production of the photos and video that get posted. Most clients use both, but they're separate services. If your problem is that nothing gets posted, you need management. If your problem is that what gets posted doesn't look good enough, you need content creation.

It depends on how many platforms you're on, how much content you need, and how much community management is involved. We scope it after a free strategy chat, so you get a real number rather than a range that means nothing.

Consistency matters more than frequency. Three good posts a week that go out reliably will outperform daily posting that stops after a month. For most businesses, three to five posts a week across one or two platforms is realistic and sustainable — which matters more than what's theoretically optimal.

No, and trying to be is the most common mistake we see. One platform done properly beats four done badly. Which one depends on where your customers actually are — usually Instagram and Facebook for hospitality and retail, LinkedIn for B2B and professional services. It's worth being honest about which platforms your customers don't use.

Organic reach has fallen a long way, so it's worth being clear about what organic actually does now: it's what people find when they check you out, and it builds credibility over time. Paid is what gets you in front of people who don't already follow you. Most businesses need both, and organic content that performs well is usually the best thing to put budget behind.

We report on reach and engagement because they tell us what's landing, but we judge success on what social produced — enquiries, bookings, event attendance, foot traffic where we can measure it. Follower count is the least useful number in social media, and we'll tell you if it's the only one going up.

You approve the calendar before anything goes out, so nothing publishes that you haven't seen. If something isn't right, we change it. If we're consistently missing your voice, that's a briefing problem and we'll fix it at the strategy level rather than post by post.