A client once ran six social platforms at once because she’d read that businesses need to “be everywhere.” She was exhausted, posting into the void on four of them, and her actual customers were mostly on one. We cut it to two. Engagement went up, and she got roughly six hours a week of her life back, which she spent on the part of the business that actually makes money.
Place: showing up where your actual customer already is, not everywhere at once.
Place used to mean physical location, the corner your shop sat on, the shelf your product landed on. Now it means which platforms, which channels, which specific corners of the internet your actual customer already spends time in. The principle didn’t change even though the meaning did: be where your customer is, not where you wish they were, and not where it’s easiest for you to be.
Here’s the myth worth killing: “be everywhere” is not a strategy, it’s the absence of one. It’s what you do when you haven’t decided who your customer is, so you cover all the bases to avoid having to choose. But covering all the bases means covering none of them well, because your time and attention are finite no matter how many tools promise to multiply them. Six mediocre channels lose to two excellent ones, every single time, because the customer doesn’t experience your “presence across six platforms.” They experience the one post they actually saw, and whether it was good.
There’s also a cost people forget to count. Every channel you run is a channel you have to maintain, monitor, respond on, and feed. An abandoned or half-hearted profile isn’t neutral, it’s actively worse than not being there, because a customer who finds your ghost-town Twitter from 2024 learns something about how you run things, and it isn’t good. Presence you can’t sustain is a liability dressed up as ambition. Fewer channels, actually tended, beats more channels slowly rotting.
The real work isn’t picking platforms, it’s knowing your customer well enough that the platforms pick themselves. If you genuinely understand who you’re serving, where they spend time stops being a guess. AI can help you show up more efficiently once you’ve made that call, drafting, scheduling, adapting one idea across the two channels that matter. It cannot make the call for you, because “where does my specific customer actually spend their attention” is a question about people you know and it doesn’t, not a question a trend report can answer.
Takeaway: You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be exactly where your customer already is, and nowhere they’re not.
Try this: List every platform you currently post on. Next to each, write down honestly whether you know, not guess, know, that your actual customers spend real time there. Cross off every one you can’t defend. Whatever’s left is where your energy should have been all along. If that leaves you with two, good. Two, done well, wins.
Quick note for newer readers: figuring out which channels are worth your time, and then actually planning what goes on them, is one of the jobs handled inside T2 HQ, my AI marketing platform. A specialist there named Jac builds the content calendar around where your customers actually are rather than a generic everywhere. The exercise above gets you most of the way by hand. The platform’s there if you’d rather not do it solo. hq.t2marketingstrategies.com.
Talk soon, Tiffany