Choosing one platform and meaning it

The most common failure in small business social media is four thin accounts rather than one real one. Posting the same thing to all of them is not a presence on four platforms, it is a presence on none.

Why one

Each platform is a different medium with its own format, conventions and expectations. Doing one well takes learning, and doing four takes four times the learning while producing a quarter of the attention each.

It is also the only way to find out whether this works for you. Four half-attempts that all produce nothing tells you nothing; one honest attempt for six months tells you whether to continue.

How to choose

1. 01Where your customers already are, which you establish by looking rather than by reading a demographics chart. Search your subject on each candidate and see whether there is a conversation.
2. 02Which format you can actually sustain. If you will not make video, do not choose a video platform, however good the reach is said to be.
3. 03Where your competitors are getting engagement, which tells you the audience exists there. Where they are posting into silence tells you something too.
4. 04What the content survives. A photograph of work suits one place, a written argument another, a short demonstration a third.
5. 05Where you personally do not mind spending time, because you will be spending time there.

The second platform

Add it when the first is genuinely working and maintaining it has become routine rather than effortful. For most small businesses that is a year in, and for many it never arrives, which is a legitimate outcome.

The exception is a platform that functions as a directory rather than a feed: a maps and reviews listing, a professional profile, a trade register. Those are not social media in the sense that needs feeding; they are business information that should be complete and correct everywhere it exists.

What to do with the ones you are not using

1. 01Register the name, so somebody else does not, and so searches for you find you rather than a gap.
2. 02Complete the profile: what you do, where, how to get in touch, a link.
3. 03Put one post there saying where you actually are, and pin it.
4. 04Turn off the notifications and leave it. A clearly dormant profile with a signpost is better than an actively neglected one.

Repurposing, properly

The distinction worth holding onto: cross-posting is pushing one finished item everywhere, repurposing is using the same underlying material to make something native to each place.

The second is legitimate and economical. One job photographed properly becomes a post on one platform, a short clip on another, a paragraph in your next email and an example on your site. Each is made for where it lands, the work is in the capture rather than in the making, and nothing has another service's watermark in the corner.

Names and being findable

• Use the same name everywhere, matching the name on your site and your invoices, so a search finds all of you.
• Register it on the platforms you are not using, including ones you have no intention of using, because reclaiming a name later ranges from tedious to impossible.
• Put the platform links on your site and your site link on the platforms. Both directions, because people check in both.
• Avoid a name that depends on a service you might leave, or a product you might stop selling.

What one platform working looks like

Worth defining in advance so you can recognise it. Not a follower number: a handful of people you did not previously know who have enquired, bought, or joined something you own, and a profile that a stranger checking you out comes away reassured by. That is a modest outcome and it is the real one. Accounts with far larger numbers and none of that are common, and they are not working.

Leaving one

If you decide a platform is not worth it, close it down deliberately rather than abandoning it. Post something saying where you are now, pin it, update the bio to point at your site, and leave the profile standing. The account keeps answering the question of whether you exist, and nobody arrives at a page whose last activity was two years ago and draws the wrong conclusion.