Somebody has told you your business needs to be on TikTok. A nephew, a man at a networking breakfast, or the competitor who posts twice a day.

Here's our answer before we argue for it. Most of you should run this yourselves, and put the money you saved into ads.

Yes, we sell social media management. Go back and read that sentence again.

A 10-person business should usually post 4 times a month itself. What we care about is where that stops being true for you.

The bit you do better than any agency

Start with what you own and we don't. You know your customers by name, you know why the good ones stayed, and you've got a phone in your pocket.

That phone is the whole game. A badly lit photo of the job you finished on Tuesday will beat anything we design for you that week.

We're good at this. We're not good enough to invent what happened on your Tuesday!

So the raw material is yours, and it always will be. What you probably don't have is the rhythm, and the rhythm is where most owners come unstuck.

What we're actually for

Here's the other half. These are the parts where paying somebody usually earns its keep for you.

• Paid advertising. This is the one to hand over. Ad platforms punish guesswork with your money, quietly and fast.
• Design at volume. If you need 12 things a month that look like the same business made them, that's a job, not a hobby. We'll be quicker than you.
• Being there when you're flat out. Your posting stops the week you get busy. That's usually the week people are looking for you.
• Telling you what worked. Not a report full of graphs nobody reads. One page saying what to do more of, and what to bin.

How to do it yourself without it dying in March

The method comes first, because it's the part that decides this for you. Take photos of everything, constantly, and post from a backlog instead of a blank screen at 22:00.

Get that right and the rest is small. Get it wrong and you'll blame your budget, when it was a Tuesday afternoon.

In our experience one decent post takes you 20 minutes when the photo already exists. It takes an hour when it doesn't, because you'll write 4 captions and hate 3 of them.

So 4 posts a month costs you a couple of hours. That sounds like nothing, and it is nothing, for about 6 weeks.

Then a big job lands. Then it's December. Then it's March and your most recent post still has a Christmas tree in it!

That's the real cost to you, and it isn't money. It's the 40th post, not the 4th.

So here's your whole DIY job, in the order that matters:

• Shoot everything, post from the backlog. Your camera roll is the content plan. A blank screen at 22:00 is not.
• Pick 1 platform, maybe 2. You're probably on 4 and doing badly on all of them. Let the rest go quietly.
• Pick a number you can hit in your worst month. Then defend it against everything else in your week.
• Answer your WhatsApp inside 20 minutes. That one habit will out-earn everything else on this list.
• Ask your last 10 customers where they saw you. That answer beats every chart, ours included!

When the answer is neither of us

Sometimes nobody should be posting yet. Not you, not us, not the breakfast man.

Paying anyone to post while your site is still a mess gets the order wrong. Why does that matter? Because every post you write sends a stranger to a page you haven't fixed.

Paying somebody to point traffic at your site while it's still taking 11 seconds to open on a phone is like hiring a town crier to shout about a shop with no door!

Sort your site out first. Then decide who posts.

The other "neither" is ads. If you sell one clear thing to one clear audience, the same money spent on ads will usually do more for you than the same money spent on captions.

Organic reach is the free bit. It sounds like something you'd buy at a farmers market, and really it's just the people who see your post without money changing hands.

Every big platform would rather you paid to be seen. That's not a conspiracy, it's their business model, and no amount of clever posting talks them out of it.

The WhatsApp bit most advice ignores

Nearly every social media guide you'll read comes out of a market where WhatsApp is just a chat app. Here it's where your customers actually buy from you.

They won't fill in your contact form. They'll send a voice note at 20:00 asking whether you've got it in blue.

We'd rather a small business answered its WhatsApp inside 20 minutes than kept a beautiful grid nobody replies from. It's the same argument we make for email newsletters.

Answer the message. That's your whole strategy!

It should change what you post, too. Put the number in your bio, end posts with "WhatsApp us", and write them so there's something obvious to ask about.

If you do decide to hire somebody

Say you've decided to pay somebody. Here's what we'd look for, and what should walk you out.

Signs you've found a good one

• They ask about your business before your budget. If the first question is what you can spend, you're a line item, not a client.
• They ask for access to your accounts. Your Facebook page, your ad account, in your name. Not new ones in theirs.
• They'll tell you no. Anyone who agrees you need to be on every platform is agreeing with your invoice, not with you.
• They keep asking you for photos and stories. The ones who don't are about to post a stock photo of a handshake on your behalf!

Signs you should walk

• They own your ad account. Your spend, your data, your pixel history. A pixel is just the code that remembers who visited your site, and it's yours.
• They promise follower numbers. Anybody can buy you followers. None of them will pay your invoice!
• They want 12 months signed before you see a plan. Ask for the first month's plan up front. If it doesn't exist, neither does the strategy.
• They won't look at your website. Somebody who doesn't care where your clicks land isn't doing your marketing, they're making posts.

That last one is why our social media marketing sits next to the website work instead of off on its own.

Questions we get asked

How often do I have to post?

Whatever number survives your busiest week. That's lower than the one you'd write down today, and 4 a month held for 2 years will outrun 20 dumped in one weekend.

Can I just use AI for the captions?

Sure, for tidying up. It'll smooth your rough sentence in about 10 seconds.

Ask it to start from nothing and you'll get a caption that would suit any business in the country. Feed it your photo and your story first!

Do I need to be on TikTok?

Only if your customers are there, and only if somebody will genuinely make the videos. That somebody is probably you, because you're the one on site.

If reading that made you tired, you have your answer!

What we'd tell you on the phone

Now the bit that dents our own pitch. We've built lovely content plans that got beaten, month after month, by a blurry photo an owner took on site with a thumb over the lens!

We've made our peace with it. That thumb photo does something we can't fake, and pretending otherwise would cost you money.

If you've got the stories and 2 hours a month you'll genuinely defend, do it yourself and put the money into ads instead. We mean that.

If your website is the weak link, fix that before anybody posts. If you're flat out and your last post was 4 months ago, that's what we're for.

Not sure which you are? WhatsApp us and tell us what you sell, or have a proper chat with us.

Send us the voice note. We're South African, we'll cope!