I had an onboarding call with a client who could not work out why nothing was landing. He said, word for word, "I have no idea what I am doing wrong, every month I premake 20 posts and schedule them to go out every weekday on all of my platforms."
That sounds efficient. Business influencers sell it as the answer: one afternoon, a month of content, done.
The next thing he told me is that he averages three likes on Facebook, five on Instagram, two on X. Across more than 10,000 followers.
Those two facts are the same fact.
Twenty posts made in one afternoon are twenty posts about nothing
Think about what actually happens in that afternoon. You pick two or three themes, reuse last month's photos, change the wording slightly, and fill the calendar.
Now look at it as a follower. The same handful of messages, the same pictures, more or less what you saw last month. Would you stop scrolling for that? Nobody would, except the owner's mother.
Your followers are not the problem, the volume is
Posting three times a day to be successful was advice for a different internet. It is not true now and it was never true for a local venue.
The average North American sees somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ads a day (source). Human beings have adapted by learning to recognize advertising instantly and skip it without deciding to. Filler posts read as advertising, because that is what they are.
You are not competing for attention against the other arcade in town. You are competing against everything else on the feed.
It is not the algorithm's fault
Blaming the algorithm is the comfortable explanation and it is the wrong one.
The algorithms do change, constantly, and keeping up is genuinely hard. But every one of them is trying to do the same thing: show people content they will stay on the platform for, because that is how the platform makes money.
So when your followers scroll past your post without engaging, the system reads that as evidence people do not want it, and it stops showing it. That is not a punishment. That is the machine doing exactly what you would do in its position.
The algorithm is a mirror. If it is not showing your posts to people, it is because people did not want the last ones.
Post when you have something worth posting
Take the hours you were going to spend making twenty pieces of filler and put them into one or two good posts a week.
Try it for a month. Engagement comes back first, then reach, then followers. I have watched this happen enough times to promise the direction, if not the numbers.
I am deliberately not giving you example posts, because some of you would copy them exactly and they would not fit. Your venue has a different brand and different customers than the one next to it.
What I will say is that the question to ask before posting is not "have I posted this week." It is "who is this for, and would they want to see it." If you cannot answer the first half of that, stop making content and go work out who your customers are, because everything downstream of that answer is guesswork until you do.