Posts That Age Like Wine vs Posts That Age Like Milk
Some posts keep working for you eighteen months later; others were stale by Tuesday lunchtime. Here's how to spot the difference, and the rough 3-1-1 ratio that keeps an SME feed earning its keep.
Dave Smith
# Posts That Age Like Wine vs Posts That Age Like Milk
Some of your posts are still working for you eighteen months after you hit publish. Others were stale by Tuesday lunchtime. The difference matters more than most small businesses realise, especially if you're posting two or three times a week rather than ten times a day.
Here's the thing about social media for SMEs: you don't have the volume to throw content at the wall and see what sticks. Every post should be earning its keep. So it's worth knowing which posts have a long shelf life and which are gone before the kettle's boiled.
The milk posts
These are the ones that go off fast. You know the type:
- "Happy Monday, everyone!" with a stock image of a coffee cup
- A meme about whatever everyone was talking about three days ago
- Bank holiday posts that look identical to every other business's bank holiday post
- "Just spotted [celebrity] using [thing related to your industry], so funny!"
- Anything that hijacks a trending topic without adding much of your own
Milk posts aren't useless. They show you're alive, they fill the schedule, and occasionally they catch a wave. But they don't compound. Nobody is searching for your bank holiday post three months from now. Nobody is bookmarking it. It does its job in the first six hours and then it's done.
The problem isn't milk posts existing. The problem is when milk posts are *all* you're making.
The wine posts
Wine posts are the ones that keep doing work long after you've forgotten about them. They tend to share a few traits.
They answer a question someone is actually asking. Not "what's your favourite season?" — but "why do you use that specific material?", "how long does the process take?", "what's the difference between X and Y?". If a customer might be wondering it, someone else is wondering it too. Probably for years.
They explain something only you can explain. The story behind why your prices are what they are. Why you do things this particular way when most of the industry does it another way. What you learned the hard way that means your customers don't have to.
They show how the work actually gets done. Not the polished end result — the bit in the middle. The materials laid out, the half-finished job, the proper kit you've invested in. This stuff plays on a loop in people's heads when they're deciding who to hire.
They make a position clear. Not controversial for the sake of it, just honest. What you believe about your work, what you refuse to do, what you'd tell a customer to ask any provider before they book. Position posts get screenshotted and shared months later.
Wine posts are slower to write because they require you to actually think. You can't fire one off whilst waiting for the dentist. But once they're up, they keep earning. Someone finds your profile in six months' time, scrolls back, sees a post explaining why you charge what you charge — and books you because of it.
The ratio that actually works
You don't need to bin the milk posts entirely. The mistake is letting them dominate.
A workable rough ratio: for every five posts you make, three should be wine, one should be milk, and one can be whatever — a chat about something you're working on, a quick photo, an off-the-cuff opinion. The wine posts hold the line. The others keep things human.
If you look back through your last month of posting and can't find three posts that would still make sense to a new customer reading them today, something has shifted too far towards the dairy aisle.
How to write more wine
A few prompts that tend to produce posts with shelf life:
- "The question I get asked most often is..."
- "If I had to explain why we do X this way, it'd be..."
- "Here's something I wish someone had told me before I started..."
- "The most expensive mistake a customer can make is..."
- "When people compare us to [cheaper option], the honest answer is..."
None of these need polishing. They just need to be true. A two-minute voice note answering one of these prompts, transcribed and lightly tidied, will outperform a week of "Happy Monday" posts.
One more thing
Wine doesn't go viral. That's not what it's there for. It does something more useful — it works quietly in the background, turning casual scrollers into people who eventually pick up the phone. That's a far better deal than fifty likes on a meme nobody remembers.
If you're only posting two or three times a week, you can't afford for most of it to be milk. Make the wine. The milk can fill in the gaps.
And if figuring out what your wine posts actually look like feels like a job in itself — that's the bit Aunty Social does for £29 a month. It learns your business, your tone, and the things only you would say, then turns them into posts that don't go off by Wednesday.