Choosing the Right Platforms

The instinct is to be everywhere, so as not to miss anyone. In practice, spreading limited effort across six platforms produces six neglected accounts, and a neglected account is worse than no account — it looks abandoned to anyone who finds it.

1. Is your audience actually there? Not "are lots of people there" — are your people there, in the mindset where what you offer makes sense.
2. Can you produce what the platform rewards, repeatedly? Each platform favours a format. If you cannot sustainably make short video, a platform built around short video is not for you regardless of its size.

A platform has to pass both. Passing only the first produces an account you cannot maintain; passing only the second produces content nobody relevant sees.

Choose the platform where the two questions give the clearest yes, and commit to it properly for several months. One well-maintained account with real engagement is worth more than five dormant ones, and it teaches you what actually works before you scale the effort.

Expanding later is straightforward. Recovering an account that has visibly been abandoned for a year is harder than starting fresh.

Automatically cross-posting the same thing to every platform is efficient and performs poorly. Each platform has its own conventions — length, tone, format, how links are treated — and content obviously formatted for somewhere else reads as exactly that.

Repurposing is different from cross-posting: same underlying idea, rewritten to suit where it is going. That takes a few extra minutes and consistently outperforms automation.

One thing worth doing even for platforms you will not use: claim your name on them. It costs nothing, prevents someone else from taking it, and leaves the option open. Just do not leave a completely empty profile — a short description and a link to your site is enough to make it look intentional rather than abandoned.