Social without a budget: how 6 posts a month beat 30

About the project

An interior design studio. They published daily, thirty posts a month, which took roughly thirty-two hours of work. Enquiries from social: seven.

The challenge

The client was convinced they needed to publish even more often, because “the algorithm likes activity”. We asked for six months of statistics and looked at which posts produced anything at all.

What the data showed

Out of 180 posts in six months, eleven produced enquiries. All eleven were the same type: a breakdown of a specific project with the floor plan, budget figures and an explanation of why those decisions were made.

The other 169 posts were beautiful photographs of finished interiors, quotes about comfort, holiday greetings. They produced likes and nothing else.

The difference between the two types is one thing: the first show how the designer thinks, the second show what came out. People commission design from someone whose reasoning they can follow.

What we did

Cut to six posts a month and kept three formats:

Project breakdown. Plan, budget, three decisions and why. Twice a month.

A mistake we made. A real case from work where something went wrong and how it was fixed. Once a month. This is the hardest format for a client psychologically and the strongest by result.

An answer to a client question. A question people genuinely ask in consultations, answered properly. Three times a month.

Plus we automated what was eating time: layout templates, a photo library tagged by project, and scheduled publishing.

What worked

The “a mistake we made” format. One post about overpaying for lighting because the electrical plan was ordered too late produced fourteen saves and three enquiries.

The logic is simple: somebody about to start a renovation is afraid of exactly those mistakes. A post where the contractor tells you about their own reads as honesty rather than advertising.

What went wrong

In the first month after the cut, reach fell 40% and the client wanted everything reversed. That is normal algorithm behaviour: it responds to publishing frequency.

Enquiries had already started rising by then. We had to show the two curves side by side to make it visible that reach and enquiries were moving in opposite directions in this case.

What we should have done

Agree on the metric before starting. We were measuring enquiries, the client was watching reach, and the first month went by in an argument about what counts as a result.

What a proper plan does to the economics

Before: 32 hours a month, 7 enquiries. That is 4.6 hours of work per enquiry. After: 11 hours a month, 21 enquiries. That is 31 minutes per enquiry.

At an average project of $2,800 and an enquiry-to-contract rate of about 18%, the difference is roughly $7,000 of additional monthly revenue, while spending a third of the time.