Your Social Media Shouldn’t Stop When You’re Busy

Most founders I speak to about social media sit at one of two ends of a spectrum.

At one end are the people who have decided it’s too much work. They don’t have the time, and they’re not convinced it does anything, so they post nothing and scoff at those who do.

At the other end are the people who watched a Gary Vaynerchuk video on a Sunday night and decided they should film themselves waking up and post five times a day. They manage it for about 48 hours (if they’re lucky), notice nothing much has happened, decide it isn’t sustainable and probably won’t work anyway.

They start in very different places, but soon they both end up in the same spot: cynical inactivity.

I’ve run Giraffe Social for over 14 years, and I’ve had this conversation with founders more times than I can remember. It’s rarely a lack of effort or ability; it’s almost always fear of sinking time into something that won’t work or making a fool of themselves.

The stark reality is that most owner-led businesses build their social media around the founder’s spare time and, for founders, finding spare time is less likely to appear than a Gary Vee TikTok meditation series.

Don’t Fill The Silence With Filler

A few years ago, when a founder ran out of time, the posting simply stopped. The account would go quiet for three months, then six. When they eventually returned, the momentum was gone, and they were essentially speaking into the void. Starting again can feel like starting from scratch because, in most cases, it was.

That still happens, but these days I see something else more often, something arguably worse. Instead of stopping, the founder hands the gap to an AI tool and lets it fill the feed. The posts are grammatically fine but say nothing, and readers can see straight through them. When the publisher network Raptive surveyed 3,000 US adults in 2025, people rated content they suspected was AI-generated as 48% less trustworthy.

I have no issue saying that, in many cases, the business would have been better off posting nothing than churning out AI slop that slowly erodes its reputation. A quiet account just looks quiet, whereas a feed full of generic filler tells people who know you that you’ve stopped paying attention, and tells everyone else there’s nothing much behind the name.

Accept That You’re Part Of The Marketing

About five or six years ago I had a conversation with another agency owner that changed how I thought about my own role. We were discussing business development, and he said that he saw his own visibility as part of his agency’s growth strategy. Being out there, talking to people, commenting on things, and posting his own thinking was, as far as he was concerned, where much of his new business started.

Once he’d said it, I started noticing it more often. The founder-led businesses I was watching seemed to grow faster, and people already felt they knew their founders. I’m a bit of an introvert, so I tried my very best to convince myself this wasn’t the case, but I couldn’t really argue with it.

Frustratingly, I did exactly what I tell clients not to do. I decided I should probably post every day, and worse, I convinced myself I needed to be on LinkedIn and Instagram, and maybe even X again too (don’t judge me). I was trying to be everywhere at once, which is exactly the advice I’d spent years telling other people not to follow.

In the end, I stripped it back to LinkedIn and roughly three posts a week. The bigger change was where the effort went. Less of it went into how often I posted and more into figuring out what I actually wanted to say, and how that connected to what Giraffe believes and what we’re trying to build. Once I had established that, knowing what to post became less of a headache.

It has made a real difference. We get far more awareness and traffic through LinkedIn than we used to. It also helps on sales calls: prospects and other agencies interested in partnering with us often know a fair bit about me before we’ve spoken, and (surprisingly) I find that helps. Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2025 research into B2B buying points to the same conclusion, noting that strong content and insights can help level the playing field for less familiar suppliers, which describes most small businesses.

Pick One Platform & A Pace You Can Keep

What I’d say to any founder now is to work out what you can genuinely commit to before you start, then stick to it. Founders tend to think only in terms of ‘going big’, so the urge to make the mistake I did will be there, but you must fight it. Find what works for you.

That might be one post a week, or it might be one a fortnight. Either is fine, as long as it keeps happening. Someone who posts every other Thursday for a year will usually get further than someone who posts every day for a fortnight and then disappears, because the people following them become familiar with the cadence.

The same goes for platforms. Choose the one where your customers actually spend their time and do it properly, rather than spreading yourself across several and letting all of them drift. For most of the business owners I speak to that’s LinkedIn, but it depends entirely on who you’re trying to reach.

Then, take the time to decide what it is you want to say. What do you want people to know about you, about your work? A clear point of view once a week will do more for you than a daily stream of posts that could have come from anyone.

Get A Month Of Content Out Of One Conversation

The other big hurdle is finding the time to keep this up. As Mike Tyson once said, “everybody has a plan until you have a full inbox, back-to-back meetings, and your plant needs watering.” Most founders fall off their posting schedule when the business gets busy, so the process has to work without you finding a spare hour.

We plan for this when we work with founders; we agree on a content strategy from the start, covering who we’re talking to and what the business wants to be known for. Then we set the founder’s commitment based on what they can realistically give, not on what would be ideal. Overstretching someone in month one is the quickest way to lose them by month two.

For most of our clients, we find that a single interview on Teams each month is about right. Before the call, we send the topics we think we need to cover, and the founder can add their own, so they know what’s coming and nobody gets put on the spot. On the day, we just talk and record.

That one recording then does a lot of work. If the set-up looks good, it becomes video, and it can also become audio clips, quote graphics, carousels and written posts in the founder’s own words. The founder gives us an hour to talk about what they know best, and we handle everything after that.

I probably shouldn’t tell you this, so keep it to yourself, but you don’t need an agency to run a version of this. If you’d rather hand the whole thing over, it’s essentially what our social media management team does, but a colleague with a phone and a list of questions can do a lot of the same job. What matters is that the founder’s part is small and booked in, so it survives a busy month.

Start Before Friday

Write down five questions your customers ask you all the time, the ones you could answer in your sleep. Get someone to ask you them while they record on a phone and see how much usable material comes out of twenty minutes. Then decide honestly how often you could do that again and plan your posting around that.