You will be able to decide how many platforms to run given the hours you actually have each week.
Most small business accounts tell the same story. The owner opens Instagram, TikTok, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and maybe LinkedIn in the same week, because each one seemed important. For a month everything gets posted everywhere. Then a busy period arrives, the posting thins out across all five, and by the third month each account has a handful of tired posts and a last update from long ago that makes the business look closed.
Spreading thin feels like caution, as if being everywhere means you cannot miss. What it usually means is that each account gets too little attention for the feed to learn anything about it, and too little care for viewers to want more.
Every platform has its own format, tone and rhythm. A Facebook post in a parents' group can be a long, chatty paragraph with a photo. A LinkedIn post that works often reads like a short, opinionated note from someone at work. A YouTube video can run for ten minutes because the viewer searched for it. A TikTok or Reel has to make sense in the first moments, to someone who never asked to see it.
So the same post copied to all of them tends to underperform in most places. A polished product photo with a price list might do fine on a Facebook page where existing customers check for updates. On a short-video feed, as lesson 1.1, The feed watches what viewers do, not what you meant, explained, the people seeing it first are strangers, and a price list gives them no reason to stop.
Running a platform well means learning its habits: what the good accounts in your category post there, how long their captions are, what people say in the comments. That learning takes weeks per platform, which is the first cost of spreading out.
There is a reasonable middle ground for short video. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook all show vertical short videos, so one good video can usually be posted to more than one of them. That is sensible reuse, and plenty of small businesses do it.
What usually needs adapting is everything around the video. The caption, because people on each platform write and read captions differently. The cover image, because profile grids crop differently. The first line of text, because a phrase that works on TikTok can sound odd on LinkedIn. Some platforms also show a watermark from another app on reposted videos, and it is worth checking each platform's current guidance on reposts before you rely on them. Export a clean copy of each video from your editing app so you have a version without any watermark to upload.
Even with reuse, each extra platform adds work. Captions need writing, comments need answering, and messages arrive in another inbox you have to check.
Before choosing how many platforms to run, write down the hours you can give to social media in a normal week. Use a real week with deliveries, admin and family in it, and leave aside the quiet week you hope for.
Then estimate what one piece of content costs you. Mei Ling, the home baker from lesson 1.2, timed herself on one short video. Planning and writing took about 30 minutes, filming 30 minutes and editing and posting another 30, so one video took about one and a half hours. Adapting a finished video for one more platform, with a new caption and cover, took about 20 minutes. Answering comments and messages took about half an hour a week on each platform. She had about five hours a week. All of these figures are her examples, and yours will differ.
With one platform and two videos a week, her week came to three hours of making videos plus half an hour of replies, three and a half hours in all, which left room to spare. With two platforms, posting the same two videos to both, she added 40 minutes of adapting and another half hour of replies, which brought it to about four hours and 40 minutes. That fit, just. With four platforms she needed seven hours, two more than she had. Something would have slipped, and from her history it would have been the replies.
This course is about organic social, which means posts that reach people because the feed chooses to show them. Paying to put a post in front of people follows different rules about audiences, budgets and tracking. It is covered in Paid ads: Meta, Google and TikTok, and you do not need it to finish this course.
The choice in front of you is narrower: how many platforms can you run well with the hours you have? For most small businesses and freelancers starting out, the answer is one platform done properly, with at most one more where you reuse your best videos.
In the activity you will write down your own weekly hours, then list what each platform you are considering would ask of you in captions, replies and format, so you can see whether it fits before you open an account.
Write down how many hours a week you can spend on social, then list what each platform you are considering would need from you.
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