Post While You Work

A plain guide to social media for someone who runs a small local business, often alone, and has no time and no marketing training.

It assumes you know nothing about social media. It explains what it is actually for when your customers live nearby, helps you choose one place to post (plus your free Google listing), and then shows you how to keep it going in about half an hour a week, using things that already happen in your working day.

It makes no promises about followers, going viral or income. It gives you a way of posting you can keep up, and a way of checking whether it brings you customers, so you can stop guessing.

Four businesses, every decision shown

You follow four invented owners through the whole book, so at least one will be like you:

• Rosa, a dog groomer in Columbus, Ohio, whose work photographs well
• Sam, a baker in Leeds, England, who is covered in flour and has no time for video
• Dale, a plumber in Tacoma, Washington, whose work happens in other people's homes
• Priya, a bookkeeper in Bristol, England, whose work is spreadsheets with nothing to photograph

What you will be able to do

• Choose where to post from where your customers actually look, and stop posting where they don't
• Set up a profile and a three-line bio a stranger trusts, and fix your Google Business Profile
• Find a week of posts in your ordinary day using seven kinds of post, with 76 ideas sorted by type of business
• Post even when your work isn't pretty or happens in customers' homes, including text cards made in two minutes
• Take a clear photo in ten seconds, line up a before-and-after people believe, and make a 15-second video with no talking
• Write a three-line caption, and know what hashtags, tags, locations and alt text are for
• Write and schedule a week of posts in one sitting, for free
• Tell whether it's working: which numbers matter, the one question to ask every new customer, and a fifteen-minute monthly check
• Decide whether to pay to boost a post, with the sum that tells you
• Answer messages, ask for reviews within the rules, and handle a bad comment calmly

Checked October 2026

Platforms change their features often, so every feature, limit and rule the book states (photo shapes, the five-hashtag limit on Instagram, how far ahead you can schedule, Google posts and reviews, business music libraries) was checked on the company's own help pages on 16 October 2026 and marked in the book. The US and UK rules on fake and incentivised reviews (the FTC rule and the UK's DMCC Act) and UK guidance on photos of people are summarised, with every source listed at the back.

What you download

• Post While You Work (52 pages, PDF, US Letter, in colour, with bookmarks and a clickable contents page)
• The planner (12 pages, PDF), in US Letter and in A4: place chooser, profile checklist, post bank, weekly plan, caption builder, video shot list, month calendar, the "how did you hear about us?" tally, monthly check, boost test, photo permission note and reply starters. For printing and filling in by hand; they are not fillable forms.

Good to know

• The four businesses, their posts and all their numbers are invented to teach with. The photographs of them are illustrations; four real photographs are credited in the book.
• It covers Google, Facebook, Instagram and Nextdoor in most detail, and TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube more briefly. It is not about growing a large online following, influencer work or paid advertising at scale.
• Where it mentions law or tax, it summarises official guidance for general information, not advice for your situation.
• This is a digital download. No physical book is shipped.