What to Post in August When Half Your Customers Are Away
August feels like the month to give up on social media, but your customers haven't stopped scrolling — they've just changed what they're in the mood to read. Here's the handful of posts that actually earn their keep in a quiet month, and why eight of them can decide how your September starts.
Dave Smith
# What to Post in August When Half Your Customers Are Away
August has a way of making social media feel pointless. The enquiries slow to a trickle, the phone stops ringing by three o'clock, and every time you open Instagram it feels like you're doing a turn in an empty pub on a wet Tuesday. So you skip a day. Then a week. And by the time the schools go back, you've got a month-shaped hole in your feed and no idea how to start talking again.
Here's the thing about August, though: the assumption underneath all of that is wrong. Not completely wrong — some of your customers genuinely are in Cornwall or Corfu — but wrong in a way that costs you.
Away doesn't mean offline
People don't stop scrolling when they go on holiday. If anything they do more of it, because they're sat by a pool with nothing to do, or queuing at Stansted, or waiting for the kids to finish in the sea. What changes isn't whether they're looking. It's what mood they're in when they look.
And that's the bit worth building on, because the August scroll is a different animal from the March scroll. In March, people are busy and skimming. In August, they're relaxed, bored, and far more likely to actually read something. They're also far more likely to be thinking about the autumn — the extension they want doing before Christmas, the accountant they keep meaning to change, the thing they've been putting off since spring.
There's also the small matter of who you're up against. Half your competitors have done exactly what you were about to do: gone quiet. Feeds thin out in August. The businesses still showing up have less to compete with than at any other point in the year.
What actually earns its keep in August
The mistake is trying to run your normal content in a month that isn't normal, then concluding it doesn't work because the numbers dipped. August wants a different sort of post.
The one that answers autumn questions. If your busy season starts in September, August is where the research happens. Post the things people want to know before they enquire: how far ahead you book up, what a typical job costs, what happens at the first appointment, how long the waiting list is. It's not glamorous, but it's the content that turns a summer lurker into a September booking.
The one about what you're doing while it's quiet. Repainting the shop. Sorting out the storeroom that's been a disgrace since 2023. Getting the van signwritten. Doing the training course you never have time for. This is genuinely interesting to people, and it costs nothing to photograph because you're doing it anyway.
The one that's just useful. A tip that helps someone whether or not they ever buy from you. What to check on your boiler before you turn the heating back on. How to store garden furniture properly. What to do with the school uniform that's already too small. Quiet months are when you can afford to be generous, because you're not competing with your own promotional posts.
The one that says you're open. Obvious, and constantly skipped. Plenty of small businesses shut for a fortnight in August, so customers have learned to assume. If you're open all month, say so — more than once. If you're closed for a week, say that too, and say when you're back. "Are you open?" is the most common message small businesses get in August and it's entirely preventable.
The one you write for future you. August is the best month of the year to bank content. You've got more headspace and less pressure. Write six posts now that you can drop into a manic week in October and you'll thank yourself.
Lower the bar, don't drop it
The realistic version of an August social media plan isn't five posts a week with a content calendar and a colour scheme. It's two posts a week that keep the lights on.
That's genuinely enough. A quiet account and a dead account look very different to someone checking you out in September — one has a post from a fortnight ago, the other has a post from April and a header image with an old phone number on it. The gap between those two is about eight posts across a whole month.
If it helps, drop the ambition rather than the frequency. A photo of the shop with two sentences under it beats an elaborate carousel you never finish. Consistency is doing something small repeatedly, not doing something impressive occasionally.
This is roughly the problem Aunty Social exists for — it learns how your business talks and keeps a steady trickle of posts going out, which matters most in exactly the months you'd otherwise go silent. Not a substitute for you turning up in the comments, but it stops August becoming a write-off.
The September you're actually building
The real argument for posting through August isn't August. It's that the businesses who go quiet for a month spend the first fortnight of September rebuilding an audience they'd already earned — reintroducing themselves, waiting for the algorithm to notice them again, remembering their own passwords.
The ones who kept ticking over start September already warm, with a month of autumn-shaped content sat behind them, talking to an audience that's just come back from holiday with money to spend and a list of things to sort out.
Same month, wildly different position. And the difference between them isn't budget or brilliance. It's about eight posts and the willingness to write them while it's quiet.