Nobody buys from you because you posted. They buy because something happened to them, and then they tried to remember who does this sort of thing. Your post only matters if it is in front of them during the short window while they are deciding.
You cannot predict that window for any one customer, which is why showing up occasionally does not work. Three things follow.
A quiet page answers a question you did not want asked. People check before they buy. A page whose last post was in March suggests a business that closed, got worse, or stopped caring.
Every post is another door. Posting monthly gives a customer twelve chances a year to notice you, and eleven weeks where the only business of your type they saw was somebody else’s.
The bar has moved under everyone. Content used to be slow and expensive to produce, which made a monthly post respectable. Your competitors now have the same tools you do, and your customer sees all of you in one feed without knowing who had a marketing budget.
So post constantly. Which raises the question that stops most businesses dead: post what?
Thinking hard about it on a Sunday night gets you a photo of the shop and a reminder that you open at nine, because that is what is in your head at 10pm. Those posts fill the calendar and produce nothing, because they connect to nothing the reader is dealing with that week.
The material that would make them land already exists, in three places, all free.
1. What your own business already knows
The most valuable of the three, and the one almost nobody uses, because it looks like admin rather than marketing.
Next week tells you what to promote. Diary, order book or last month’s takings by day, you know where the gaps are. Four empty slots on a Thursday, or a weekday that is always dead, is a specific hole a specific offer could fill.
What people buy together tells you what to describe. Nearly every business has a pairing half their regulars choose that has never been written down publicly.
What has gone quiet tells you what to explain again. A service that was busy in August and slow in October did not stop being good. People stopped thinking about it.
Who has stopped coming tells you who to talk to. Someone who visited three times and disappeared already knows your name. Much shorter journey to a sale than a stranger on Instagram, and winning repeat visits is its own discipline.
Your reviews tell you which words to use. Customers describe what you do in language you would never choose, and that language is what other customers type into Google. Whatever is arriving in your Google reviews this month is free copy research.
The questions your staff answer daily tell you what to write. If reception explains the same thing ten times a week, hundreds more are wondering it silently. The same questions are worth teaching Watson once, so neither the post nor the answer has to be written again.
2. What your customers are paying attention to
Your Google Business Profile performance view shows the searches that actually brought people to you. Your customers, in their words, in your area. Two minutes to read, and most owners have never opened it.
Google Trends for Malaysia shows what is rising nationally, with volumes. Search demand moves with the seasons in every category, and rising interest is a customer deciding shortly before they spend.
Then the questions arriving this week in WhatsApp, DMs and at the counter. Three people asking the same thing is a topic that found you, and how fast you answer them decides whether it turns into anything.
3. What is happening around you
News is the biggest source and the easiest to skim. Anything affecting your town, your industry or your customers’ costs puts people in mind of something adjacent to what you sell.
MET Malaysia forecasts by town rather than state, which matters when rain reaches one suburb and misses the next. Weather changes what people do, cancel and buy within a day.
The Department of Environment publishes the Air Pollutant Index through its environmental quality portal, station by station. When haze arrives, behaviour shifts within hours.
The Ministry of Health carries the official wording for dengue clusters, flu seasons and advisories. If you reference a health matter, take the wording from there.
Then the local things needing no website at all. A road closure, a competitor’s promotion, a new neighbour on the street.
The calendar sits behind all of it and needs no checking. Raya, Chinese New Year, Deepavali, school terms, paydays, the monsoon. Put them in once a year.
How to tell what is worth posting
Once you start looking, everything looks like an opportunity. That is how businesses end up putting their logo on national tragedies.
One question settles it: does this change what a customer wants from my business this week?
Not whether it is interesting. Whether it moves demand for the thing you sell. A wet week changes what a physiotherapy clinic should be saying and means nothing for an accountant. Haze is a strong week for air purifiers and a thin one for a hair salon.
The closer the information sits to your own business, the less it has to prove. Your empty Thursday is always relevant. A national trend rarely is.
When the answer is no, you do not go quiet. You go back to section one. Outside events are the sharpest content you can publish because they are timed to something real, and the least reliable because some weeks nothing happens. Your own material is always there, always relevant, just less urgent. A week with no signal is a week you run on your own.
One line to hold. When something serious is happening and it genuinely concerns you, floods or haze or an outbreak nearby, say the useful thing and keep the discount out of that post.
One thing you notice, several posts
One observation is worth more than one post, because the same situation means different things to different customers. Take the empty Thursday and the wet week together:
- The answer. That question three people asked, written down once for everyone who did not ask.
- The useful one. Something genuinely helpful about the week people are having, with no pitch attached.
- The service. The thing you do that this week makes more relevant, explained to someone who did not know you did it.
- The offer. Thursday has room and the week gives you a reason to mention it.
- The proof. A recent example of that service, with permission, in the customer’s own words.
Now notice who each one is for. The answer is for people who have never used you. The useful one is for followers who have not bought in a while. The offer is for anyone close enough to come on Thursday, which is where a promotion earns its place. Same week, same business, different people, each needing it said differently.
That is where it gets heavy. Two branches, three platforms and four kinds of customer stops being five posts. The thinking stays the same and the writing multiplies, and that multiplication is the job.
The moment and the people
Everything above gets the message right, which is the part you can genuinely do yourself, because you know your trade.
Two things decide whether it works.
The moment. Haze matters on the first day, while people are deciding whether to keep the children home, not the Monday after when everyone has adjusted. A promotion the week before payday does different business from the same one the week after. Check once a week and you catch some moments late and miss others.
The people. One post to everybody is the compromise everyone makes, and where most of the value leaks out. Writing it once for everyone means writing it for nobody in particular.
Both are continuous work rather than Monday work.
Two honest options
Do it yourself. Check your own records and the outside sources often, write while the thing is still happening, and make a second version for the customers it affects most. You will be ahead of nearly everyone in your category, because almost none of them are looking at any of this.
Be realistic about where it breaks. It is rarely the idea that fails. It is week three, when the person doing it also runs the front desk and Thursday gets busy.
Or have something do it continuously. That is what watson.my’s Content Creator does. It reads sources like these on a schedule rather than when someone remembers, reads your own sales, services, reviews and the questions customers keep asking, works out what is relevant to your business and your area right now, writes the posts, and puts them in front of you to approve before anything goes out.
The thinking does not change either way. What changes is whether the right message reaches the right people while the moment is still open.
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