Founder & Chief Executive Officer
It is time we treated social media as a revenue-generating tool rather than a task to get through.
The revenue does not arrive overnight, and it rarely comes from somebody seeing one post and buying immediately. It might be six months. It might be a year before somebody decides you are their person. Which means you have to have been showing up in front of them during all of that.
I do not keep social media on a task list. I block time in my calendar labelled as revenue-generating time, and posting sits inside that block, because I depend on it. Treating it that way is what makes me consistent.
Nothing about posting gives you the feedback that revenue-generating work usually provides.
Send an invoice and money arrives. Make a sales call and you get an answer. Publish a post and you get a number that has no evident relationship to your bank account, which makes the whole activity feel like administration with extra steps.
The feeling is reasonable and the conclusion drawn from it is wrong. The payoff is real and it is simply arriving later than the feedback does, which is a different problem from the work not mattering.
Summary Posting provides none of the immediate feedback other revenue work gives, which makes it feel like administration. The payoff is real and arrives later than the feedback.
There is a useful heuristic for this, generally credited to Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, known as the 95:5 rule. At any given moment roughly 5% of your potential buyers are actually in the market, and the other 95% are not.
Worth saying plainly that this is a rule of thumb rather than a precisely measured constant, and the real split varies considerably by industry, price point, and how often people buy what you sell. The proportions are indicative. The pattern they describe is sound and it explains a great deal.
So when you post, the overwhelming majority of people seeing it have no intention of buying anything from anybody today. That is not a failure of your content. It is the normal composition of any audience, and it is exactly why the results take months to appear.
Summary The 95:5 rule, credited to John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, holds that roughly 5% of potential buyers are in the market at any moment. It is a rule of thumb that varies by category, and it explains the delay.
Once you accept the composition of the audience, the purpose of posting becomes clearer and considerably more motivating.
You are not trying to convert the 95%. You are making sure that when somebody moves from the 95% into the 5%, which happens on their schedule rather than yours, you are already somebody they know. The buying window opens, they think of who they trust in your category, and your name is available to them because you have been present.
Research on buying journeys consistently finds people complete most of their decision-making before contacting anybody, which means the work of being considered happens entirely before you know they exist. Every post is deposited into that period.
That reframes what a quiet post actually was. Nobody engaged, and several people who will need you next spring saw your name.
Summary The purpose is being known when somebody moves from the 95% into the 5%, which happens on their schedule. Since people complete most decision-making before contacting anybody, the work of being considered happens before you know they exist.
A reframe that stays in your head changes nothing, which is why the scheduling matters.
I block the time and label it for what it produces. Social posting sits inside that block alongside everything else that generates revenue, which means it competes with other revenue work for the slot rather than competing with admin for the leftovers. Anything in the leftovers pile loses to whatever is urgent.
Name the block whatever makes sense to you. The function of the label is reminding you what the activity is for during the months when nothing visible is coming back from it.
Summary A reframe that stays in your head changes nothing. Blocking labelled time means posting competes with other revenue work for the slot rather than losing to whatever is urgent.
The delay has a practical implication people miss, and it is the strongest argument for where your effort should sit.
If somebody takes eight months to become ready, the post you published today has been gone for seven and a half of them. Average half-lives for social posts run under a day on most platforms, so the specific content that made an impression is no longer findable when the person finally goes looking. They remember you vaguely and then have to locate you.
Content on your own website is still there. A page answering the question they now have can be found at the moment they develop the intention, which is months after you wrote it. Search engine optimization is the mechanism that connects those two moments, since somebody entering the market starts searching, and the page you published in March is waiting. A good SEO company builds for exactly that lag.
So the sensible division is social media keeping you present with the 95%, and your website being there to catch them when they convert. Both halves are revenue-generating, and only one of them survives long enough to be found later.
Summary Social posts have half-lives under a day on most platforms, so the content is gone when somebody becomes ready months later. A page on your website can be found at that moment, which search engine optimization connects.
Since the feedback problem is the real obstacle, it helps to measure something that moves sooner than revenue.
Track whether your reach is growing, whether people are arriving at your website from social, whether enquiries mention having seen your content, and whether new clients arrive already knowing what you do. That last one is the clearest signal, since somebody turning up pre-convinced is the delayed payoff landing.
Ask new clients how they found you and how long they had been aware of you. The answers tend to be longer than expected, and hearing somebody say they had been following you for a year before getting in touch does more for your consistency than any amount of theory.
Summary Track reach growth, website traffic from social, and whether enquiries mention your content. Asking new clients how long they had been aware of you tends to produce longer answers than expected.
Social media is a revenue-generating tool, and the reason it feels otherwise is that the revenue arrives six months or a year after the work.
Most of the people seeing your posts are not buying today, and showing up for them anyway is the entire job, so that you are already familiar when they are ready. Block the time, label it for what it produces, and make sure something of yours is still findable when somebody finally comes looking.
That is what consistency is actually buying you.
Sources:
The 95:5 rule, generally credited to Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, holding that approximately 5% of potential buyers are in the market at any given time, discussed via Dreamdata. The figure is widely used as a heuristic rather than a precisely measured constant, and the underlying split varies by category.
https://dreamdata.io/blog/the-95-5-rule-john-dawes
Scott Graffius, Lifespan (Half-Life) of Social Media Posts: Update for 2026, analysis of over 5,600,000 posts (average half-lives under one day on most major social platforms).
https://www.scottgraffius.com/blog/files/lifespan-halflife-of-social-media-posts-update-2026.html
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