Every guide gives you a number. The honest answer is that the right frequency is the highest one you can sustain indefinitely, because stopping is far more damaging than posting less often.

Sensible starting points per platform

Facebook: three to five posts a week. Reach for small business pages is modest, so quality and replies matter more than volume.

Instagram: three to five feed posts a week plus stories on the days between. Stories carry much of the engagement and take a fraction of the effort.

LinkedIn: two to three posts a week. It rewards considered posts far more than frequent ones, and a good post keeps working for days.

Google Business Profile: weekly, and genuinely underrated. For a local business this affects whether you appear in the map results at all.

YouTube: whatever you can truly sustain — even monthly. Consistency of schedule matters more than the gap between videos.

Why consistency beats volume

Every platform is trying to work out whether you are an active account worth showing to people. An account posting twice a week for a year signals that far more clearly than one posting daily for three weeks and then going quiet for two months.

The stop-start pattern is the single most common mistake we see. It usually comes from setting an ambitious schedule in week one that nobody can keep by week six.

Work out your real capacity first

Be honest about how much time you have. If that is one hour a week, plan for two good posts, not seven rushed ones. Batch the work — write a fortnight of posts in one sitting and schedule them, rather than trying to think of something every morning.

What to actually post

A simple mix that works for most small businesses: roughly half genuinely useful content that helps your customer whether or not they buy, a third showing your actual work and the people behind it, and the rest direct offers. Most struggling accounts are almost entirely the last category.

Photographs of real work, real premises and real staff consistently outperform polished stock imagery. People follow small businesses because they are not faceless.

What to measure

Ignore follower count. Watch saves, shares and direct messages — those are the things that correlate with enquiries. A post with 40 views and two messages is worth more than one with 4,000 views and none.

Not enough hours in the week?

This is exactly what our social media management is for — we plan, write, post and reply, and send you a plain-English report each month.

See how it works