What to post when you think you have nothing to post

The most common thing we hear from local business owners is some version of: I would post more, but nothing happens that is worth posting.

That belief comes from comparing yourself to accounts that exist to entertain. Yours does not. Nobody follows a roofing company for entertainment.

What people are actually doing on your profile

Somebody got your name from a neighbour. Before they call, they look you up. They spend maybe forty seconds deciding one thing: do these people look like they know what they are doing?

They are not evaluating your content. They are checking whether you are real, whether you are active, and whether the work looks competent. An empty or abandoned profile answers all three badly.

Which means the bar is not interesting. The bar is evidence.

Seven posts that always exist

These are available to almost every local business, every week, without inventing anything:

• Before and after. The most reliable post in local business. It requires no caption and no cleverness.
• The part nobody sees. The prep, the diagnosis, the tools laid out. Process reads as expertise.
• A real question you got asked. If one customer asked it this week, hundreds are wondering it.
• The person doing the work. Name and face. People hire people, especially when they are letting someone into their home.
• A finished job, with the detail you are proud of. Point at the thing most people would not notice. That is what shows craft.
• Something you fixed that went wrong. Handled well, this builds more trust than any polished post.
• Something local. The street, the neighbourhood, the event you sponsored. It proves you are actually here.

Seven types, posted once each, is nearly two months of content at three posts a week. None of it required an idea.

Stop filming daily, start filming monthly

Posting consistently and filming consistently are different problems, and most people conflate them and quit.

Pick one day a month. Capture a batch: a few before and afters, a couple of questions answered to camera, some footage of the work happening. One afternoon produces a month of posts, and the pressure to come up with something daily disappears.

This is the single change that takes most businesses from posting sporadically to posting reliably.

Good enough beats polished

A slightly shaky phone video of actual work outperforms a glossy graphic with a stock photo, nearly every time. The shaky video is evidence. The graphic is decoration.

Nobody has ever chosen a contractor because the caption had good grammar. They choose because the work looked right.

Clean audio matters more than clean video. If you only fix one technical thing, get closer to the microphone.

The only rule

When you are stuck, show the work. Not opinions about your industry, not motivational quotes, not a graphic saying Happy Friday.

The work. That is the thing you have that nobody else has, and it is the only thing the person deciding whether to call you is actually looking for.