Choosing the right social platform for your business
The most common social media mistake we see is not bad content. It is five half-abandoned accounts, each posted to sporadically, none with enough momentum to matter. Being genuinely good on one platform beats being present on five.
Two questions decide it
Where do your customers already spend time? Not where you do. If you sell to procurement managers at manufacturing firms, no amount of short-form video will find them where they aren't.
What can you sustainably produce? A platform that demands daily video, when nobody in your business wants to be on camera, will be abandoned by week three. Choose for the reality of your team, not your ambitions for it.
What each one is actually good at
Strong for anything visual: food, interiors, beauty, fashion, property, trades with satisfying before-and-afters. Weak for anything you cannot photograph. Requires a real cadence to hold reach.
The obvious choice for selling to other businesses, particularly considered services with long decision cycles. Personal profiles consistently outperform company pages, so the founder posting beats the brand posting.
Still dominant for local businesses and older demographics, and Groups remain genuinely useful for community trade. Organic reach for pages is poor — treat it as an advertising platform with a page attached.
TikTok and short video
Enormous reach available, weighted toward discovery rather than following. Excellent for demonstrations, teaching something quickly, and personality-led businesses. Demands volume and a tolerance for things not working.
YouTube
The slowest to build and the longest-lasting. A tutorial that answers a real question keeps earning for years, which none of the others do. Effectively a search engine, so treat it like SEO.
Test before committing
Pick two candidates. Post properly on both for six weeks — consistent, genuinely useful, not links to your website. Then look at which produced actual conversations, not which produced more likes. Drop the other one without guilt.
Judge it on the right measure
Follower count is the vanity metric that keeps people busy on the wrong platform for years. What matters is enquiries, saves, shares, and profile visits — signals that someone is moving toward buying rather than idly approving.
Post like a person
Show the work. Answer the questions customers actually ask. Explain what you are doing and why. The businesses that do well on social media are usually the ones being straightforwardly useful, not the ones with the best-designed graphics.
You do not have to be there at all
If your customers find you through search, referral, or a directory, social media may simply not be your channel. There is no prize for maintaining an Instagram account that has never produced a customer. Put that hour into the thing that works.