The shop that posts a little and often does better than the shop that saves up for one big effort. And the most expensive thing you can do is go quiet for weeks, because being forgotten is slow and hard to undo.
That is the whole lesson, and it takes the pressure off. You do not need a clever campaign. You need to be seen regularly, in small ways, by the people near you.
Think of a plumber who posts a photo of a tidy job most weeks, nothing fancy, just the finished work and one plain line. Over three months that is a dozen quiet reminders that he exists, does good work and is local. Compare him with a plumber who posts nothing for two months and then puts up one long advert about a discount. The first plumber is the one whose name comes to mind when a tap starts dripping, because he never left the frame.
There is good evidence behind this. Les Binet and Peter Field studied hundreds of marketing campaigns and found that businesses which keep a steady presence, rather than going quiet between big pushes, grow more over time (Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA). Steady beats spiky. A shop that is always gently there beats one that shouts twice a year and vanishes in between.
This matters most in the quiet months, when it is tempting to stop. If trade is slow and you think there is no point posting, that is exactly when the ground is cheap. Your rivals have gone silent, so it costs you almost nothing to be the one shop people still hear from. You can see this on the back to school run-up: September is a quiet reset when many businesses fall silent, and simply turning up then is some of the cheapest attention of the year.
So how often is often enough? A useful rule is once or twice a week, every week, without fail. Twice a week that you can keep up beats every day for a fortnight and then nothing. The number matters far less than the fact that it never stops.
The reason people struggle is not the writing, it is the size of the job they imagine. They picture a polished post that takes an hour, so they put it off, and one skipped week becomes a skipped month. The fix is to make each post small enough that skipping it feels silly.
Here is what small looks like. One photo of what you did today. One line under it. A regular who came in. The tray that just came out of the oven. The van loaded for the morning. None of these need editing or a special idea. They need to go up.
And do not measure a single post by the likes it got. That is not the point. Each post is one more sighting, one more small reminder, and the value is in the run of them, not in any one. The plumber whose dozen quiet posts got barely a like each still won, because when the tap dripped, his was the name that surfaced.
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: pick a rhythm you can actually keep, make each post tiny, and never go dark. Being steady is a real advantage, and it is one almost any shop can have, because most cannot be bothered.
Pick your day, keep each post small, and never let a week go by empty. Open What should I post?, tell it in a line what happened in your shop this week, and put up the caption and the words for your picture it gives back. That is the whole of keeping the rhythm: two minutes, once a week.