Two hours a week on social media is plenty, once it's pointed at something

77% of small business owners run their own social media accounts. 54% spend between one and three hours a week making content, and another 11% spend four to seven.

65% have never had any training in it.

Those figures come from Markel Direct, who surveyed 501 UK small business owners and tradespeople through Censuswide in July. One caveat: the sample leans towards trades, so read it as a direction for owner-led businesses rather than a precise figure for every sector.

Before the obvious conclusion, one more number. 84% say social media generates business for them, and 60% can point to specific work they won from it.

So this is not an argument for posting less. The hours are already being spent and they are already paying something back.

The number that matters

63% say they struggle to look different from anyone else.

Sitting right next to that: 55% create content purely to stay visible, and 60% would rather be doing the work they set the business up to do.

Read those three together and the picture is fairly clear. A lot of owners are producing content on a treadmill, without a point of view, because stopping feels worse than continuing.

Here is the thing that makes it worth fixing. Posting to stay visible costs exactly the same hours as posting with a point of view. Same evenings, same phone, same effort. It just returns less.

Two hours a week is roughly a hundred hours a year. That is a real budget. It deserves aiming.

Pick three things you want to be known for

The change that shifts this is not a new platform or a better camera. It is deciding, once, what you want to be recognised for.

Three is the right number. Enough to be recognisable, few enough to remember at seven in the morning when you are writing something on your phone between jobs.

Pick them from what you argue about. The judgement calls you make on site or on a call that a competitor would get wrong. The thing you always end up explaining to clients because the industry does it badly. The opinion you have said out loud three times this month.

Those are your three. Everything you post comes from one of them.

Same two hours. You just stop starting from a blank page every time, which is where most of the effort was going anyway.

Photograph the decision, not just the finished job

For anyone doing visual or practical work, this is where most of the value is being left behind.

A finished project is a record. It looks good, and anyone with a phone could have shot it. What nobody can copy is why you made that call. The bit where you changed the spec because the original would have failed in two winters. What it saved. What you would do differently.

That is the content that makes someone think you know what you are doing, because it shows judgement rather than output. It is also the content that costs you nothing extra, because you were on site anyway.

Two posts a week, each clearly from one of your three themes. That plan fits on a sticky note, which is the only kind of plan that survives a busy month.

Keep one measure

Follower counts will not tell you whether any of this worked, and chasing them will pull you back towards posting for visibility.

Track one thing instead. Enquiries that mention something you posted.

It is a small number and it will feel unimpressive for the first couple of months. It is also the only number that connects the hundred hours to the business, and once it starts moving you will know which of your three themes is doing the work.

The hours are already there

That is what makes this worth doing. You are not being asked to find time you do not have. The time is already committed, by 77% of owners, mostly without training and mostly without a plan behind it.

Three decisions turn the same hours into something recognisable.

If you would rather have those three decided properly, with a content approach built around them, that is the kind of thing a social media content strategy sorts out in one go rather than one post at a time.