Most small businesses I work with aren't underposting. They're overposting, and burning out by month three.
The math goes like this. Some marketing post tells them they should be on five platforms. Daily. With "consistent voice." So they map out a schedule that requires producing 35 pieces of content a week — five platforms times seven days. They post for six weeks. They start dropping platforms because Instagram is too much. By week ten they're posting twice a week on Facebook only, with a guilt complex about the platforms they abandoned. By week twelve they've stopped entirely and concluded "social media doesn't work for us."
Social media works fine. The cadence was wrong.
The 70/30 rule
Here's the actual math for a small business with limited time. Pick the platform where 70% of your audience already is. Post there 3 times a week. Pick a second platform where some of the rest hang out. Post there twice. Stop.
That's it. That's the whole framework. Five-platforms-worth of posting, condensed to the two that matter, and a cadence you can actually sustain.
For most small businesses, the 70% platform is one of:
- Facebook if your audience is local and over 40
- Instagram if your audience is under 40 or visual-first (food, design, fitness)
- LinkedIn if your audience is B2B or working in a corporate environment
- TikTok if your audience is under 35 and you're not afraid of video
The 30% platform is wherever the rest of them hang out. Don't agonize. If you're guessing wrong, you'll find out in the first 90 days.
The actual cadence
Here's what works for a one-person operation:
| Channel | Per week | Time per post |
|---|---|---|
| Primary platform | 3 | 10 min |
| Secondary platform | 2 | 8 min |
| Google Business Profile (if local) | 2 | 5 min |
| Blog | 1 | 60 min writing + 10 to post |
| Newsletter | 1 / month | 45 min |
Add it up. That's about 90 minutes of posting work per week, plus a one-hour blog draft. Total: 2.5 hours a week.
Most small business owners can find 2.5 hours. Most can't find 14. The cadence that works is the one you can actually do.
The 90-minute window
Here's the key. Do all the posting in one 90-minute block. Schedule it. Same time every week. Tuesday morning works for most people because the inbox is reasonable, the weekend's fresh, and the rest of the day still has time for client work.
In that 90 minutes:
- 30 minutes: write the week's social copy (3 + 2 + 2 = 7 posts)
- 20 minutes: queue them up in your scheduler
- 30 minutes: write the GBP posts and the newsletter outline
- 10 minutes: Tuesday's blog goes live, share it across platforms
Done. The rest of the week, you respond to comments and messages but you don't think about content production. The content's queued.
Don't scale up
The single biggest mistake I see is scaling up cadence before scaling up audience. "I'm doing three posts a week and not seeing growth — I'll go to five!"
Your audience isn't slow because you're posting too little. Your audience is slow because audience growth takes 6 to 12 months at any cadence. If you double your posts, you double your work, not your growth. (Honestly, you usually decrease your growth, because the quality drops.)
Stay at the 70/30 cadence for a year. Then evaluate. If something's working — keep doing it. If something's not working, stop doing it. Don't add more.