I post a lot. Not on a schedule, not from a content calendar, not because I batched it on a Sunday afternoon with a cold brew and a Spotify playlist designed to make me feel like a professional content creator.
I post when I have something to say. Which, it turns out, is all the fucking time.
This gets treated as unprofessional in certain corners of the internet. Erratic. Unsustainable. A liability for anyone who takes their business seriously. The consistency police will tell you that you need a strategy, pillars, a posting schedule, and ideally a spreadsheet that makes the whole thing feel like a second job you didn’t apply for.
I’m not interested in that.
What I have instead is a point of view about my work, and a low tolerance for keeping it to myself. I think that’s actually what social media is supposed to be for. Honest communication with people, rather than posts that are all sneakily advertisements.
Here’s where my posts actually come from.
I’m working with a client and something comes up. I write the post I would send directly to her — the thinking I’d want her to have access to, made public so anyone sitting with the same thing can find it. I usually send her the link. Sometimes it helps me to demonstrate my thinking.
What that looks like depends entirely on the business.
If you’re a cleaner, maybe you write about the urge your clients have to clean before you arrive — what actually helps you do your best work versus what doubles it for everyone. That’s not a marketing post. That’s a post written to one specific woman who apologised for her kitchen bench last Tuesday, and every woman like her.
If you sell jewellery at a market and you had a conversation with a customer about how many necklaces a woman of a certain age is allowed to wear at once — write to her. Write the thing you wanted to say when she asked. There are ten thousand women who’ve asked themselves the same question and never said it out loud.
The post isn’t for the algorithm. It’s for the person you were already thinking about.
I have opinions about my industry. Strong ones. About the way business advice gets packaged and sold. About who gets centred in conversations about entrepreneurship and who gets treated as an afterthought. About marketing tactics that work by making people feel bad. I say them out loud. Sometimes people disagree. That’s fine — disagreement means someone was paying attention.
You have opinions about yours. The soap maker who writes about why she won’t use synthetic fragrance, even though customers ask for it. The landscape designer who keeps planting natives when the brief says roses. The jeweller who thinks minimalism is a con. Say the thing. The people who agree with you are your people.
I explain my own decisions. Why I built my products the way I did. Why I price the way I price. Why I won’t work with certain businesses regardless of what they’re offering to pay.
Some people are utterly bored by this stuff — but usually those aren’t my people. If you make soap maybe posting about the oil base you choose to use, or if you build landscapes your choices of native plants as a dominant feature — explaining why helps find your people.
I make jokes. I share work I think is good. I ask questions I actually want answered. I just say what I do and what it costs and who it’s for.
None of this requires a plan in the way the consistency police mean plan. It requires being genuinely engaged with your work and your industry. It requires having a view and being willing to put it in writing.
I think this comes more naturally to some people than others. If you’re neurodivergent, if your brain makes connections quickly and gets bored of repetition, if the idea of writing the same four content types on rotation makes you want to close the laptop and go for a walk — maybe just try posting like you’re talking to people.
The systemised version of posting on social media isn’t built for everyone’s brains. I don’t think it’s built for genuine connection. It was built for a different kind of business, run by a different kind of person, optimising for a different kind of outcome.
If that system works for you, use it. But if you’ve been staring at it wondering why it feels like performing rather than communicating — it might just not be yours.
Post like you’re talking to people. Because you are.