Two weeks of posts, made — not suggested

The distance between "post three times a week about your customers" and three posts that exist is where most small-business social media dies. It isn't a knowledge problem. Nobody running a van and a booking calendar is short of ideas about their own trade — they're short of the ninety minutes it takes to photograph something, write something, decide whether it's embarrassing, and put it up. So the account goes quiet in week three, and the quiet is what a potential customer finds when they check whether you're still trading.

So the useful unit isn't advice. It's a finished fortnight: fourteen posts that already have a picture, a first line, a caption, a set of hashtags, a platform and a time. Fourteen because that's about as far ahead as a small business can plan without the plan being fiction, and because two weeks is long enough to notice which kind of post gets a reply.

What Velofound makes, in one press: five creative briefs written for your business, an AI photo or a short reel generated from each, captions and hashtags written for every post, and a fourteen-day calendar that puts each one on a day, a platform and a time. What it does not do is post them. That distinction has its own section further down, and it's worth reading before you decide whether any of this is useful to you.

Everything visual on the calendar comes from five briefs — three photos and two reels. A brief is not a prompt with the business name pasted in; it's a goal, a described shot, a caption, a set of hashtags, and for reels the on-screen beats and a shot list. The image model gets the described shot. The founder gets everything else.

Two things about those images that a marketing page would normally leave out. They are generated, not photographs of Northline's actual van — so they work as atmosphere and they do not work as proof, which is why the calendar puts specifics in the captions rather than in the pictures. And the briefs deliberately keep hands and text out of frame, because those are the two things image and video models still get visibly wrong. There is a longer version of that argument, with a reel that failed because of it, on the AI reels page.

Four surfaces: Instagram 7 posts, Facebook 4, TikTok 2, and one email. The mix isn't a formula — it's where a local service business's customers actually are, weighted toward the one that does the most work. A B2B consultancy's fortnight comes out mostly LinkedIn with no Stories in it at all.

The times aren't from a study of global posting times, and any tool that tells you 11:47am on a Tuesday is guessing with more decimal places than it has evidence for. They're a guess about this business's customers: commuters check their phones before work, so the how-to posts go early; the Saturday availability Stories go up at nine when someone might still act on them that day; the reels go out in the evening because that's when people watch reels. If your customers are restaurant owners, the whole thing shifts to three in the afternoon.

This is the part that's actually worth having. Fourteen captions written to be pasted, with the first line separated out because on every one of these platforms the first line is what shows before "more". Copy any of them; change the postcodes.

Look at what those captions have in common. Every one contains a fact a competitor couldn't copy without lying: a price, a measurement, a neighbourhood, a number of bikes, a specific week. That's not a style choice — it's the only defence against the flat, could-be-anyone voice that generated captions fall into. A caption that says "we're passionate about cycling" costs the reader nothing to skip. "This chain was 0.9mm over" makes them look at their own chain.

Be clear on the boundary, because it's where most tools in this category are vague. Everything above — the briefs, the images, the reels, the captions, the hashtags, the day, the platform and the time — is generated in one go and sits on your dashboard. The posting is yours. Velofound does not hold your Instagram, Facebook or TikTok login, does not publish to them on your behalf, and does not schedule into a third-party posting tool. Each post sits in the calendar with a tick box: you copy the caption, download the image or reel, put it up, and tick it off.

Two honest reasons for that. The first is scope: auto-posting isn't built. The second is the one that would matter even if it were. A post published without a human reading it is the one output on this list you can't take back — a wrong price, an old postcode, a Saturday availability Story that goes up on a Saturday you're already fully booked. Everything else in the product is a draft you approve; the same rule applied here happens to be the difference between a tool that saves you ninety minutes and one that puts something wrong under your business's name at seven in the morning.

Hashtags do less than you were told, and that's settled now

Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, put it plainly in July 2026: hashtags work, but they have never been a good way to increase reach. Distribution on Instagram comes from recommendations and engagement signals, not from tag volume. So the thirty-hashtag block is doing nothing except making the caption look like an advert. The current sensible practice is one to five precise tags that answer "what is this about?" — a place, a trade, a topic — and none at all where they don't help.

That's why the calendar above carries three tags on Instagram posts, three on TikTok, and none on Facebook or email. It also refuses #fyp, #explorepage and their relatives, which are pure noise: millions of posts a day, no topical meaning, and no evidence they do anything but signal that a post is chasing reach. Instagram allows thirty hashtags and 2,200 characters of caption. Neither of those is a target.

The first line is the post

On a phone, roughly the first 125 characters show before "more", and on Reels and Stories much less. So the calendar separates the hook from the caption and writes it to work alone. "This chain was 0.9mm over" is a complete thought that makes you look at your own bike. "At Northline, we believe in quality service" is a sentence a reader can safely skip, and they will.

The specs, once, so you never think about them again

Reels and Stories are 9:16 at 1080×1920, MP4 or MOV, H.264 video with AAC audio, 30 frames a second. Instagram raised the Reel limit to three minutes in January 2025 and has since taken longer uploads still, but says Reels over three minutes aren't recommended to new audiences — for a small business the useful range is 6 to 30 seconds anyway. Feed images want 1080×1350 at 4:5, which takes up more of the screen than a square. Keep text out of roughly the top 15% and bottom 20% of a Reel, because that's where the interface sits. And put captions on every video: most of the people who watch it will do so with the sound off.

Day fifteen

At the end of a fortnight you have something you didn't have at the start, which is evidence. Usually one or two posts got a reply, a save or a message, and the rest got nothing much — that's normal and it isn't a verdict on you. Keep the format that worked, brief three more of those, and re-run the calendar. The second fortnight is always better than the first because it's built on something that happened rather than on a guess, and it takes about ten minutes to commission.