Should you be on every platform?
Start with two, where the people who buy from you already are, and add a third only when the first two produce something you can point at.
No.
That is the whole answer, and the rest of this explains why it is not laziness, because the instinct that put you on six platforms was a reasonable one and it deserves better than being called a mistake.
Start with two. Choose them because your customers are there, not because the platforms are large. Run both properly for a season, and only add a third when the first two are producing enquiries, saves, messages, something you can point at. That rule is boring and it beats every version of trying harder.
Why does everywhere feel like the safe answer?
Because absence feels like risk and presence feels like insurance.
Every empty account is a door you have not opened, and there is always a story about somebody whose business changed because of the one platform you are not on. Meanwhile, setting up an account is free and takes four minutes, so the cost of adding one is invisible at the moment you add it.
The cost arrives later, and it arrives as thinness. Six accounts posted to occasionally look worse than two accounts posted to properly, because a dormant profile is not neutral. Somebody checking you out finds four posts from last spring and reads it as a business that started something and gave up, which is the exact opposite of the reassurance the account was opened to provide.
There is also the part nobody budgets for: every platform has messages, comments and questions attached to it. Six inboxes is six places somebody can be ignored.
How do you choose the two?
Two questions, in this order.
Where do the people who already pay you spend their attention? Not the general population. Yours. If you have customers, you can find this out this week by asking eight of them where they saw you or where they look for people who do what you do. Eight conversations beats any article about platform demographics, including this one.
Which one can you make things for without dreading it? A platform that suits your work and your temperament gets fed. If you hate being on camera, an account that only works with a face on it will fail, whatever the audience data says. That is not a character flaw, it is a constraint, and constraints belong in the decision rather than in the guilt afterwards.
Where those two answers agree, you have your first platform. Your second is the next best answer to the first question, unless it needs a completely different kind of material, in which case take the one that shares material with the first.
What does "my customers are there" actually mean?
It means the people who could buy from you are already using that platform for something adjacent to buying from you.
Everybody is on the big platforms in the sense that they have an account. That is not the same as going there to find a wedding photographer, a bookkeeper, or somebody to fix a roof. The useful question is whether people arrive at that platform in a frame of mind that could lead to you.
Two signals worth more than any figure. First, search the platform for what you do and see whether anybody is asking about it. A place where your subject is discussed is a place where your subject can be discussed by you. Second, look at where your competitors get comments rather than where they get followers. Followers can be inherited. Comments are current.
When do you add a third?
When both of the first two have produced something you can name, over a run of months rather than a good fortnight.
Something you can name means a message, an enquiry, a booking, a person who mentioned a post during a call. Not reach. Reach is a number about distribution and it will happily grow while nothing else does.
If neither of the first two is producing anything after a proper run, adding a third does not fix that. It divides the same effort further and gives you a new place to be disappointed. The fix is either different material on the same platforms or a different platform in place of one, and both of those are decisions rather than additions.
The tension in this advice, said out loud
There is an argument that runs the other way, and it is a fair one. A business with a properly run presence across several platforms does better than one with a single account, because people check more than one place before they trust you, and because a name appearing twice reads differently from a name appearing once.
This studio holds both positions at the same time, and does so deliberately: a comprehensive operation across several platforms performs better, and the way to get there is still to start with a small number and widen in a controlled way, based on what the first ones actually produced.
Those two things only look contradictory if you read the first as a starting position rather than a destination. Nobody arrives at a good six-platform operation by opening six accounts in one afternoon. They arrive at it by running two well enough that a third became obviously worth the trouble, and then repeating that. The end state is broad. The route to it is narrow, and taking the end state as the route is how businesses end up with six thin accounts and no evidence.
Go and count what you are currently posting to, including the ones you have quietly stopped feeding. Then decide which two you would keep if somebody made you close the rest, because that decision is the plan, and everything after it is scheduling.
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