Should you be on every platform?

No.

That is the whole answer, though the instinct that put you on six platforms was a reasonable one.

One or two platforms is a workable starting point for a small team. Choose for audience fit and capacity, then judge progress against the job you gave each channel.

Everywhere feels safe

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.

Ask a handful of customers where they found you and where they look for businesses like yours. Use those conversations alongside platform data; a small customer sample will not describe the whole market.

Which platform can you make useful work for consistently? Consider the formats available, your team and the production support you can afford. Disliking the camera is a constraint to plan around, not an automatic reason a platform will fail.

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" 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; followers are the wrong count. 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.

Define a useful result for each channel: relevant reach, saves, messages, enquiries or bookings. Reach measures distribution; pair it with evidence of audience fit or action before treating it as business growth.

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

A wider presence can help people encounter and check your business in more than one place. It also costs more to operate. Breadth is useful when the additional channel has a clear job.

Our starting point is a manageable operation. We widen it when there is a good audience reason and enough capacity to sustain the work.

A broad operation may be the right destination, or two well-run channels may be enough. Add the next channel for a reason you can explain, rather than because it exists.

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.

Sources and evidence

Our method. Start with two platforms, chosen by asking a handful of existing customers where they already look, run both properly for a season, and add a third only once the first two have produced something nameable, an enquiry, a message, a booking, rather than reach alone. This studio treats that as a route to a wider presence rather than an argument against one.