What We're Not
We're not a social media agency. We don't have a Slack channel of 22-year-olds running 40 brand accounts. We don't do community management. We don't run paid social. We don't build TikTok dance trends.
If you need community management, comment moderation, influencer outreach, or paid social management, we're not your shop. Those are real disciplines with real specialists, and the good ones will serve you better than we can.
What We Do
Help small businesses — typically two-to-fifteen people — maintain consistent organic social content without hiring a full-time content person. The math is straightforward: a competent in-house social manager costs $65–$95K plus benefits. Most small businesses can't justify it, but they also can't justify going silent for six months at a time.
The pipeline below is what we set up for clients who want to ship two-to-five posts a week without it taking over their lives.
The Pipeline
Monthly planning session (60 minutes). We sit down with you (or your designated marketing person) and map out the content themes for the next 30 days. Usually 4–6 themes tied to your service lines, seasonal moments, or actual things happening in your business. The output is a one-page plan.
Weekly batch (90 minutes). Once a week, we draft a week's worth of posts together using AI as the heavy lifter. You bring the substance (a project you shipped, a lesson you learned, a question a client asked). We turn it into platform-appropriate copy, suggest the visual, and schedule it.
Daily reality check (5 minutes). You glance at the scheduled posts in the morning. If something feels off given what's happening in the world, you delete or reschedule. We don't ship politically tone-deaf posts because nobody was watching.
Monthly review (30 minutes). What worked, what didn't, what to do more of, what to retire. Adjusted into next month's plan.
What We Use
- Claude or ChatGPT for first drafts and platform adaptation (a LinkedIn post is not an Instagram caption)
- Buffer or Hootsuite for scheduling — whichever you already use
- Canva for visuals when you don't have a designer
- Your phone camera for the most-engaged content there is, which is unstaged photos of actual work
Nothing exotic. The discipline is the cadence, not the tooling.
The Platforms That Actually Matter
For most B2B small businesses, the answer is two platforms, not seven. We'll help you pick honestly:
- LinkedIn — almost always yes for B2B, especially if the owner is the brand
- Instagram — if your work is visual, your clients are consumer-adjacent, or you serve a local market
- Facebook — if you serve a local market and your customers are 40+
- X / Twitter — usually skip unless you're already established there
- TikTok — only if you have the personality for it and the time to learn the format
- YouTube Shorts — if you're already producing video, it's a low-effort add
Posting to all of them poorly is worse than posting to two of them well. We'll have that conversation in the first session.
What We Measure
Four numbers, looked at monthly:
| Metric | Why we care | |--------|-------------| | Follower growth | Slow signal of relevance | | Engagement rate (likes + comments + shares ÷ impressions) | Faster signal — tells us what's resonating | | Click-throughs to the website | The metric that connects social to revenue | | Inbound DMs that lead to conversations | The metric that small business owners actually feel |
We don't optimize for impressions or reach. Both are too easy to inflate and too disconnected from outcomes that matter.
Pricing
| Engagement | What you get | Investment | |------------|--------------|------------| | Setup sprint | Pipeline built, first month's content shipped, you take it from there | $1,500 | | Monthly partnership | Planning, weekly batches, scheduling, monthly review, 2–5 posts per week | $1,800/month |
We don't do six-month minimums. Month-to-month. If you can run it yourself after the setup sprint, run it yourself.
When to Skip This Entirely
- You're pre-product and chasing investors. Social won't save the pitch.
- Your customers don't use social media for buying decisions in your category (most home services, most B2B SaaS targeting enterprise, most government contracts).
- You hate every social platform on principle and refuse to be on camera. The pipeline still works, but it shows.
How to Start
Send us a LinkedIn profile or Instagram handle you admire in a business roughly your size. We'll do a 20-minute call and tell you honestly whether you have the raw material (substance, time, willingness) to run this pipeline. If you don't, we'll tell you that too.
Hank Groman | hank@lastapple.com | 949-529-9017