Practical
Hours, changes, deliveries, what is in today, what is not. Dull, and the most read thing you will ever publish. Somebody standing in the street with a phone is looking for exactly this.
Local business
A Tuesday in February
The bakery, the clinic, the fitting company, the garage. One person doing everything, no marketing department, and a Facebook Page that has to look alive on a day when nothing in particular is happening. That day is the whole problem, and it is the one every content tool quietly ignores.
Why the second month is where it stops
Nearly every small business can produce a fortnight of good posts. There is a launch, or a season, or a burst of enthusiasm after somebody says the Page looks dead, and for two weeks it is genuinely fine.
Then February happens. Nothing is new, the days are long, and posting requires inventing a subject from nothing at seven in the evening after a full day of actual work. So it stops — not because anyone decided to stop, but because there was never a decision to make it easy.
A plan made in advance is a decision made when you had time, applied on a day when you have none. That is all this is, and it is why the plan matters more here than the writing does.
Size it to ten minutes a day
The constraint for a local business is never ideas and never budget. It is approval time — the minutes you have to read a draft and decide whether it sounds like you.
So the useful plan is small. Three or four slots a week, on the one or two channels where your customers actually are, at a cadence you can keep in the week your dishwasher breaks. Almost everybody asks for more at the start, discovers it in week three, and halves it; you can save yourself the fortnight by halving it now.
The free tier connects one channel, which is exactly the right way to start. Run a real plan on your Facebook Page for a month, find out what approving actually costs you, and add the second channel when you know the answer.
A February week, planned in NovemberIllustration
- MoFacebookWhat is on this week. Two sentences. Approved on Sunday in one tap.
- WeInstagramBehind the counter: your own picture of the tray coming out, no filter.
- ·Open slotLeft empty in the plan. Used for the delivery that turned up early.
- SaFacebookSaturday hours, said plainly, because that is what people check.
Four slotsAbout ten minutes of reading
The bakery down the road has better stories than most software companies.
What to say in February
Three themes are usually enough
Local businesses tend to overthink this. Customers are not waiting for insight; they are checking whether you are open, whether anything is new, and whether you still sound like people they want to buy from.
Craft
How the thing is made, why it takes as long as it takes, what goes wrong and how you handle it. This is what makes you a specific business rather than a category, and it works in any trade.
Seasonal
The parts of the year your business actually has. Not the marketing calendar — yours. The plan is told about them once and works around them for six months.
Two writers, one shopIllustration
- 1The one who postsWarm, short, never salesy. Sounds like the person behind the counter, because it was described by them.
- "Sample"Ready at seven. The rye took its time tonight, which is how we like it."
- 2The one with the noticesPlain and quick. Says when you are open on Sunday for the twelfth time without sounding tired.
- "Sample"Saturdays yes, from eight, and it goes fast. Say you're coming and we keep one aside."
Synthetic examplesYours are described in your words
It has to sound like you,
and that takes a fortnight.
The first drafts will be close and wrong. A phrase you would never use, a cheerfulness you do not have, a claim about quality you would be embarrassed to make out loud. You correct those — rewrite with a note, edit by hand, and fix the writer when the same mistake comes back — and by the third or fourth week there should be far fewer.
That fortnight is the actual work of setting this up, and it is worth doing properly, because everything afterwards runs on it. It is also why a persona described in three specific sentences about how you really talk beats two pages of adjectives.
Your own photographs matter in the same way. FABLS can draw a picture when a post has none, but you upload yours in the app or paste an address — and a slightly out-of-focus picture of your own counter will always do more for a local business than a perfect picture of somebody else's, drawn or not.
The honest bit: this will not make a quiet business busy. What it fixes is the specific failure where a customer checks your Page, sees nothing since August, and quietly assumes you have closed. That failure is common, it costs real money, and it is entirely avoidable.
What a month looks like
when it is working.
Fourteen or fifteen things published across two channels. Ten or twelve minutes a week spent reading drafts, mostly on a phone, mostly approved unchanged after the first month. One or two slots used for something that actually happened — a delivery, a closure, a photograph worth posting — because the plan deliberately leaves gaps for those.
And at the end of the month, the report: what was planned, what went out, and what each platform counted. Not because anyone is reporting to anyone, but because two or three of those in a row is what tells you whether it is worth continuing.
What the free tier includes