Deciding Which Two Platforms to Keep

Start with capacity, not merit

The usual question is which platform is best for your trade, which produces a debate with no resolution.

The answerable question is how many hours a month you actually have, which has a number.

Divide that by what one platform genuinely costs and you have the count.

Only then does it matter which ones, and by that point the decision is much easier because there are fewer slots to fill.

What one platform actually costs

• Producing something worth posting.
• Adapting it for that platform.
• Posting and checking it looks right.
• Replying to comments and messages.
• Keeping the profile current.

Four hours a month is a realistic figure for a small business doing this properly and not well. The fourth is the one people forget and it is the one that cannot be batched or skipped.

Be honest about the hours available

Which is where the exercise either works or does not.

Not the hours you would like to spend, and not the hours somebody told you this deserves.

The hours that exist after the work, the quoting, the invoicing, and everything else that has to happen.

For most owner-operated businesses the honest figure is four to eight hours a month for all marketing combined, not for social alone.

Which means one platform, or two if social is the whole of your marketing effort.

Anybody proposing five is proposing something that has never once fitted in the time actually available to a small business.

A worked example

A business had five profiles and felt guilty about four of them.

They worked out they had about six hours a month for marketing in total, which included the review requests and the occasional page update.

That left roughly four hours for social, which works out at one platform.

They picked the one where enquiries had actually come from, parked the other four properly, and put the recovered time into posting on that one consistently.

Enquiries from social rose over the following year, from one platform rather than five.

Consistency on one beat presence on five, which is the finding almost every business arrives at eventually.

Then choose on evidence

Once you know how many slots there are.

Which platform has produced an enquiry you can actually point to.

Which one your customers mention when you ask how they found you.

Which one you can stand to use, since a platform you dislike will be abandoned by March whatever its merits.

And which one suits what you actually have to show, since a trade with photographs and a trade with expertise are different cases.

Those four questions, answered honestly, answered one after another, nearly always converge on the same single platform.

Where they disagree, the one where an enquiry actually came from wins, since that is evidence and the others are judgement.

Write the reason down, so that next year's review starts from what you decided rather than from scratch.

The one that came with something else

Worth checking, since it distorts the count.

Profiles created automatically alongside another account, or set up by a supplier during a project, or made years ago for a campaign.

Those are not decisions and they should not occupy a slot.

Find them, park them properly, and count only the ones you would choose today.

Most businesses have at least one and are not entirely sure it exists.

Under-commit deliberately

Which is the adjustment nobody makes.

Whatever number the arithmetic gives you, take one fewer for the first six months.

Capacity estimates are optimistic, busy periods eat the margin first, and a plan that fails in July is worse than a smaller one that holds.

A business posting reliably on one platform looks considerably better than one posting erratically on two.

You can always add the second slot in January if the first has been comfortable.

Adding a platform from a position of having spare capacity works, and adding one while already stretched has never worked for anybody.

Recalculate when capacity changes

Since this is not a permanent answer.

Taking on staff, a quieter season, or handing the posting to somebody else all change the number.

So does the reverse, and a business that got busier should reduce rather than continue on goodwill.

Review it once a year at the same time as everything else, and treat a reduction as a normal outcome rather than a failure.

Stopping a platform because the hours went into paid work is a good sign about the business.

The listing is not one of the slots

A distinction worth making before the arithmetic sends somebody in the wrong direction.

Your local business listing takes perhaps twenty minutes a month and produces more enquiries for most trades than every social platform combined.

It should come out of the budget before the division rather than competing for a slot, alongside the review requests and the occasional page update.

A business that parked its listing to free up hours for a social platform has made the trade backwards, and it happens.

Protect that twenty minutes first, ahead of everything else, then divide what remains.

The counter-case

Some businesses need more than one.

Where customers genuinely divide across platforms by age or type, covering one leaves half of them unreached.

A business with somebody whose job includes this has real capacity and a different calculation entirely.

And some platforms cost far less than four hours, particularly where posting is a photograph and a line taken during the working day.

Measure your own for a month rather than accepting the figure, since the honest number is the one your budget should use.

Work out your honest monthly hours, divide by four, take one fewer, and park the rest properly.

The arithmetic

1. Write down the hours you actually have.
2. Subtract the non-social marketing.
3. Divide by four.
4. Take one fewer.
5. Find the accidental profiles.
6. Choose on where enquiries came from.
7. Park the rest properly.

Step four is the one that makes the plan survive a busy quarter, since every capacity estimate is optimistic and the first thing lost is the marketing hour.

The underlying argument is covered in being on one network rather than five.

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.