Being on One Network Rather Than Five

Why five profiles happen

Each one is created for a reason at the time.

Somebody said you should be on this one. A supplier asked for a link. A tool offered to set them all up at once.

Creating a profile takes ten minutes and maintaining one takes years, and the second cost is invisible at the moment of creating it.

The result is a business with presence in five places and activity in none, which is the common state.

Why abandoned is worse than absent

Because a profile is a public statement about whether the business is operating.

Somebody finding a page whose last post is from 2018 concludes something, and it is not favourable.

The reasonable inferences: the business closed, is not doing well, or does not respond to messages.

None of those is true, and all of them are what the page communicates.

A business with no profile at all is simply not on that platform, which carries no meaning either way.

Choosing which one

• Where your customers actually are, not where businesses are told to be.
• Where your work photographs well, if it is visual.
• Where local groups exist for your area.
• Where you will actually post, which is a real constraint.
• Where enquiries have come from before, if any have.

The fourth is the one to be honest about. A platform requiring content you will not produce is not a choice you have made.

A worked example

A trade business with profiles on four networks, all created during a marketing push two years earlier.

Two had never been posted to at all. One had eleven posts from a single month. The fourth was updated occasionally.

They kept the fourth, which had a small local following and where a handful of enquiries had come from, and closed or removed the links to the others.

Posting to one place every fortnight turned out to be sustainable, where posting to four had not been.

Within a year the remaining page had a genuine local audience, and two jobs had arrived through it.

Nothing was lost by removing the others, since none had produced anything or been seen by anybody.

What each is actually for

A rough guide, and worth checking against your own customers rather than accepting.

Facebook remains where most local community activity happens, including neighbourhood groups where recommendations are asked for and given.

Instagram suits visual trades and reaches a younger audience, and it is where finished work photographs best.

LinkedIn suits business-to-business work and is largely irrelevant for a domestic trade.

Twitter is fast-moving and rarely productive for a local service business.

And a video platform suits anybody whose work is genuinely explainable visually, at a considerably higher production cost.

The one that came with something else

A category worth checking for, since these are the profiles people forget exist.

A directory listing that created a linked profile. A supplier's partner page. A review platform that generated a page from public information.

Those exist whether or not anybody chose them, and they carry whatever details were available at the time.

Which means a profile you never created may be showing a phone number from two premises ago.

Searching your business name and looking past the first few results usually turns up two or three, and most can be claimed and corrected in ten minutes each.

The counter-case

Where more than one is justified.

A business with genuinely different audiences, such as domestic and commercial work reached in different places.

Where two platforms are connected and a single post appears on both without additional effort, which is a real convenience rather than two commitments.

Anybody with somebody whose job includes this, where the capacity genuinely exists.

And a business for whom social is a primary channel rather than a supplement, which is a legitimate strategy requiring real investment.

Closing one properly

Worth doing deliberately rather than by neglect.

Where the platform allows it, delete or unpublish the page rather than leaving it visible.

Where it does not, post once saying where you can be found, update the contact details so they are correct, and leave it.

A final post pointing somewhere active turns an abandoned page into a signpost, which is the best available outcome.

And remove the icon from your website footer, since a link to a dead profile is worse than no link and appears on every page.

The profile that ranks for your name

A practical reason some profiles are worth keeping even when barely used.

Social profiles rank well for business names, which means yours may occupy a position on the results page for people searching for you.

Which is useful when the page is current and actively harmful when it shows a phone number you stopped using in 2017.

Where a profile ranks and you are not going to maintain it, the minimum is correcting the contact details and adding a line pointing to the website.

That takes five minutes and turns a liability into something that works, without any ongoing commitment.

What maintaining actually requires

Less than people fear, and worth stating so the commitment is realistic.

A post every week or two, which for a trade means a photograph of finished work and two sentences.

Replying to messages and comments within a day or so, which matters more than posting.

Keeping the contact details, hours and service area current.

That is perhaps twenty minutes a fortnight, which is sustainable, and it is what one page maintained properly costs.

Five pages at that standard is two hours a fortnight, which is why five does not happen.

What to do

1. List every profile that exists for the business.
2. Check when each was last posted to.
3. Ask where enquiries have come from.
4. Keep one.
5. Close or signpost the rest.
6. Remove dead links from your website.

The first frequently turns up profiles nobody remembers creating, including some set up by a former supplier with contact details that are years out of date.

The whole exercise is an hour, and it removes several public statements about your business that you never intended to make.

Where those links live on your own site is covered in icons nobody recognises.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.