I’ve been talking a lot about social media and how it can be a blessing or a curse for business owners, and especially solopreneurs. Part of the reason why is that I was launching the Threads challenge.
The other part is the fact that there’s a constant tension in how we use these platforms for all of us. I see it in all my clients’ businesses, and I see it in mine.
We all know that being on multiple platforms is helpful. But how many? It doesn’t help that every social media platform has a different career plan for you.
LinkedIn would like you to become a Thought Leader™, preferably one who opens every post with a humiliating personal failure and closes it with a lesson about B2B sales.
YouTube would like a dependable production schedule, thumbnails featuring your shocked face, and enough editing to make a woman sitting at a desk resemble the trailer for a Christopher Nolan film.
Instagram wants video. Threads wants conversation. Substack would like newsletter writers to spend their days writing Notes about writing newsletters, creating a thriving economy in which newsletter writers sell newsletter advice to other newsletter writers.
To be fair, each platform offers opportunities.
Each also has a business model, a preferred type of content, and a long wishlist for your time.
Follow those incentives unquestioningly and something strange happens: your business gradually reshapes itself around what platforms reward.
I’ve seen way too many solopreneur businesses trying to resolve the tension between what an opportunity-clad platform rewards in terms of content and what their business truly needs. I’ve also seen people on 5 channels and with half a business because their time is spent on creating different types of content more than on the business.
So I think that this arrangement deserves slightly more scrutiny than we tend to give it. We’ll do that in a second, after I brag about the cool things my friends and Council members do.
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Let’s start with the elephant in the room:
Platforms are built to serve themselves
A platform wants people to arrive, stay, interact, and return.
This is neither shocking nor evil. It is the commercial machinery underneath the free account you opened after clicking “I agree” on several thousand words you definitely read.
Every feature, prompt, notification, creator guide, and algorithmic reward points toward behaviors that support that machinery.
These platforms keep adding opportunities because more activity makes the platform more useful, more competitive, and more commercially valuable.
The trouble is that you experience the same expansion as a to-do list.
Post consistently. Reply quickly. Try the new format. Engage before publishing. Engage after publishing. Turn on notifications. Start a newsletter. Film more video. Repurpose the video into clips. Comment thoughtfully on fifteen posts. Join conversations. Host a live session.
Feed the machine another small piece of your central nervous system.
To me, that’s the gist of this tension: a platform can make a perfectly rational request for its own growth while making a ridiculous request of your business.
The danger arrives disguised as good advice
Most platform advice sounds reasonable.
Video can communicate personality and build familiarity. Conversations can create relationships. Newsletters can nurture trust. Short-form posts can test ideas. Comments can introduce you to people outside your existing audience.
I use several of these mechanisms myself.
The problem begins when “this can work” becomes “your business should keep doing this. All of this.”
In many cases, your content strategy begins absorbing the platform’s priorities. Eventually, the business itself follows.
- You create offers that are easy to promote in short-form content.
- You choose topics that reliably generate engagement.
- You give more attention to people who interact publicly, even when the buyers you want prefer to observe from the sidelines. (This is why I wrote about conversations last week)
- You develop a voice suited to the feed and wonder why it sounds peculiar on a sales page.
Format drift becomes business drift
I’ve been thinking about thinking a lot these days because I started noticing how my thinking is shaped by where I spend my time.
Whether we like it or not, every format trains you to think in a particular way.
- Short-form platforms reward compression, immediacy, frequency, and reaction.
- YouTube requires enough development to sustain attention across several minutes.
- Newsletters allow longer arguments and direct audience relationships.
- Search rewards content that answers questions people already know how to ask.
These constraints can improve the work because a strict format forces choices, and “the medium is the message” (source).
The trouble comes when the format starts deciding which ideas deserve to exist.
A consultant may have a commercially valuable observation that needs 1,500 words to develop. On Threads, it becomes a punchy claim stripped of the reasoning that made it credible.
A writer may have a sharp sentence perfectly suited to Threads but turning it into a twelve-minute YouTube video requires adding seven minutes of verbal upholstery and a personal story about breakfast.
I’m a big fan of repurposing and reusing content to increase your digital footprint with minimal effort. Yet, even that is taxing.
Marketing capacity is a business constraint
Large companies can treat every platform as a separate publishing operation. They can hire writers, editors, designers, community managers, video producers, analysts, paid-media specialists, and so on.
A solopreneur has one finite pool of time, which makes channel strategy a resource-allocation problem.
This is why, in my strategy sessions, I’m always very intentional about recommending channels. It’s never “Instagram would be good for your niche” but rather “Let’s assess what Instagram can do for you”
Because a channel becomes commercially useful when it performs a valuable job at an acceptable cost. And that job needs to be explicit.
Give every channel one primary job
A channel might help you:
- Reach qualified people who have never heard of you
- Demonstrate the judgment behind your offer
- Move interested people onto an email list
- Test whether a problem or argument resonates
- Start conversations with potential buyers or partners
- Help existing prospects build enough trust to buy
- Retain customers or create a path toward another offer
Several secondary benefits may appear. Choose one primary job anyway.
Once the job is clear, the content becomes easier to evaluate.
If Threads exists to test ideas and meet relevant people, you should examine which posts produce useful conversations, qualified profile visits, newsletter subscriptions, and insights worth developing. A post receiving 80 replies from other marketing creators may look lively while contributing roughly the commercial value of a karaoke night.
If YouTube exists to establish authority around a specific problem, search discovery, qualified viewing, email subscriptions, and sales conversations matter. Upload frequency deserves attention only insofar as it supports those outcomes within your available capacity.
If LinkedIn exists to put your expertise in front of prospective clients, a modest post that produces two relevant conversations can outperform a broad motivational story that reaches the equivalent of a small European nation.
The job determines the metric, and the metric helps you resist the platform’s definition of success.
Decide what the channel is allowed to cost
Assigning a job still leaves one unpleasant question: how much of your life may this channel consume?
Set a capacity limit before the platform sets one through accumulated FOMO.
For example:
- Threads gets three hours per week, including replies.
- LinkedIn gets two original posts and three focused engagement sessions.
- YouTube gets two videos per month using a deliberately simple production standard.
- The newsletter receives protected time because it supports trust, sales, and an owned audience.
These are my examples, not sacred ratios delivered to me on a stone tablet by the God of Content. The point is to create a ceiling — always! Because otherwise, any platform becomes a timesuck.
One other metric I like to consider is the opportunity to create passive value. In my business, my newsletter gets most of my attention because, unlike social media, everything I create for it can be repurposed and used multiple times in multiple formats, across multiple channels.
Separate platform compliance from business value
Every channel imposes a certain amount of platform compliance aka the behaviors required to participate effectively.
Whether we like it or not (and we usually don’t), you cannot publish whatever you fancy, ignore how people use the platform, and then accuse the algorithm of suppressing your genius.
Still, compliance should have limits.
Ask three questions whenever a platform appears to demand more:
- Will this behavior improve the channel’s ability to perform its assigned business job?
A new format may increase reach among people irrelevant to your offer. That produces platform performance and a warm little graph. The business remains unmoved.
2. What is the full cost?
Include creation, editing, preparation, community participation, measurement, tools, and the recovery time required after filming yourself saying the same sentence sixteen times.
3. What higher-value work will receive less attention?
The true cost of another platform habit may be the newsletter you fail to write, the offer you never improve, or the customer research you keep postponing because you are busy replying “Great point!” beneath a post you did not particularly enjoy.
This third question ruins a great deal of fashionable marketing advice.
Good!
Use a channel contract
For every active platform, write a short internal contract:
- Business job: What specific role does this channel perform?
- Audience: Which people are you trying to reach there?
- Content function: What must your content help those people understand, believe, or do?
- Capacity: How much time and money can the channel receive?
- Evidence: Which signals would show that it is performing its job?
- Review date: When will you evaluate it?
- Exit or reduction condition: What would justify scaling back?
Here is a simplified example from the Threads challenge we just kicked off in The Council:
Threads
Job: Test sharp ideas and start conversations with solopreneurs and independent experts.
Content function: Make commercially relevant ideas easy to discuss and connect them to deeper newsletter arguments.
Capacity: Thirty to sixty minutes on active days, three to five days per week.
Evidence: Relevant conversations, qualified followers, newsletter subscriptions, usable audience language, leads, and sales.
Review: After a focused 30-day experiment.
Reduction condition: The activity produces mainly peer engagement, weak downstream movement, or a workload that crowds out the newsletter.
This is channel governance.
You decide what the platform is hired to do, how much it may cost, and what evidence it must produce before receiving more resources.
Decisions, decisions, decisions
The reason our group calls in The Council are called Decision Clinics is that I know how many damn decisions we have to make. It’s not easy; heck, it can be paralyzing, especially with so much conflicting advice out there.
The best way to resist FOMO is to channel that main character energy (without the toxicity): this is about me and my business. Can a certain channel support that?
That’s the only question that matters. Everything else (who swears by the channel, how good the reach is, how trendy a platform is) is 100% irrelevant.
Did you ever hop on a channel out of FOMO and regret it? Reply and let me know!
