When you’re starting to promote your product or service on social media, it can be a struggle to maintain a presence on all platforms.

The average social media user logs in to seven platforms a month, so your audience could be present anywhere and everywhere.

But the time and budget needed to stay active on all platforms is the single biggest ROI concern for organisations.

So how do you decide where to put your effort?

For confidence of a positive ROI, brands are more bullish when it comes to LinkedIn, Instagram and WhatsApp as social platforms. On the other hand, Threads’ newness and X’s current trajectory mean that brands are least confident of ROI.

But just because other brands are confident of a positive ROI doesn’t mean those platforms are right for you. And it certainly doesn’t mean you should dismiss them.

Despite social platforms’ general trend towards video content, there’s an abundance of cases where you should focus on text-based content, instead of forcing yourself to create videos because that’s the current trend.

Consider what fits your goals best between of visual content and text-based content. These aren’t mutually exclusive and you can explore both, but knowing where your priority lies is important if you have any time or budget limitations.

To decide which platforms to focus on, you need to consider three main things:

• What your goals are with social media
• Where your audience is, and what they’re looking for
• What you have the capability to deliver on

What are your goals with social media?

It’s key that you know what you want to achieve with your business, and by extension social media. Are you wanting to enable a large audience to discover you? Are you trying to position yourself as a thought leader on a certain topic? This gives you a good starting point to work out which platforms you should show up on.

If you’re advertising your sports videography skills, you’ll probably have more luck getting clients’ attention on Instagram than X.

Where is your audience?

While the average social user uses seven platforms a month, that usage won’t be equal in terms of time spent. Your ideal client likely spends the majority of their online time in one or two places. Research where people in your target audience spends their time online, what they want to see on social media, and what their habits are within the platforms they use.

Consider your target audience, and where they would spend their time. If your services are aimed at CEOs, you’re more likely to find them on LinkedIn than TikTok.

What can you deliver consistently?

And finally, what can you actually deliver with high quality to showcase your services? If you’re resource and time poor, trying to develop cinematic YouTube videos is probably not feasible. Perhaps look at how you can focus on TikTok videos which have a lower barrier entry and time cost. Instead of writing lengthy LinkedIn posts, write on X.

We also include ‘consistently’ in this question, as it’s all well and good creating that beautiful YouTube video, but if you can only publish one per month and that’s all of the social media marketing that you do, then you miss countless touchpoints and interactions with potential consumers that you could capitalise on if you posted consistently.

Once you have identified which platforms make the most sense for you to put effort into you can iterate on what works, doubling down on the platforms that serve you well. You also don’t need to rigidly stick to these platforms, as experimenting with others could put you in front of a wider audience, but it makes sense to put the vast majority of your time into the one or two platforms that bring the biggest returns.

You can also take your best-performing content and repurpose it for different channels. With the previous example, your best performing post on X is likely worth expanding into a LinkedIn post.

This way, you make the most of being active across multiple platforms, without spreading yourself too thin.

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