The Death of 'Be Everywhere': A Content Creator's Wake-Up Call
Dispelling the Omnipresence Myth
This article originally appeared on Medium
Every content creation guru preaches the same gospel: be everywhere, all the time. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Medium, Substack, Pinterest, Clubhouse — the list grows monthly.
The promise is seductive: maximum reach equals maximum opportunity.
It might be a suitable approach for monolithic brands and agencies who can throw dollars, bodies and instantly deploy an armies of AI agents.
Right after COVID, while ChatGPT was still incubating in the lab somewhere in Silicon Valley, I spent about two years chasing this omnipresence fantasy.
With the help of an offshore social media operations team armed with some respectable automations, I posted daily across these six platforms for clients and for myself.
I customized content for each audience. Tracked engagement metrics in spreadsheets that resembled air traffic control systems.
The result?
Mediocre performance everywhere, excellence nowhere.
Here’s what the “be everywhere” crowd won’t tell you: platform sprawl can kill your growth potential.
The Mathematics of Mediocrity
Content creation follows power law distributions. Your best-performing content typically generates 10–50x more engagement than your average posts.
But creating that top-tier content requires focused attention, deep platform understanding, and consistent optimization.
Spread across six platforms, you’re essentially guaranteeing six mediocre performances instead of three exceptional ones.
I tracked my metrics obsessively during my omnipresence experiment. Across nine platforms, my average engagement rate was 2.3%. My best individual platform hit 8.7%.
The correlation was clear: attention dilution led to performance dilution.
After consolidating to three platforms, my average engagement rate jumped to 6.8% and then doubled to 12.4% within a year. Same time investment, dramatically different results.
The Compound Interest of Platform Mastery
Algorithms reward consistency and specialization. Every platform has unique optimization requirements, content formats, posting schedules, and audience behaviors.
Mastering these nuances takes months of dedicated experimentation.
LinkedIn’s algorithm favors professional insights posted between 7–9 AM on weekdays.
TikTok’s discovery engine prioritizes completion rates and immediate re-watches. YouTube rewards watch time and session duration.
Each platform is essentially a different language requiring fluent comprehension.
The creators dominating these platforms aren’t spreading themselves thin — they’re going deep.
They understand their chosen platform’s psychology, timing, and technical requirements at a granular level.
Why Medium?
Medium became my long-form foundation for strategic reasons that extend beyond simple content hosting.
First, Medium’s built-in distribution network eliminates the cold-start problem plaguing standalone blogs.
Your content immediately enters their recommendation engine, exposing quality writing to relevant audiences without requiring an existing follower base.
Second, Medium’s curation system creates credibility signals. Getting featured in major publications or earning editor’s picks builds social proof that transfers across platforms. When I reference my Medium features during speaking engagements, it carries weight that self-published blog posts simply don’t match.
Third, Medium’s reader base skews toward decision-makers and industry professionals. The platform attracts people who consume long-form content intentionally, not accidentally. These readers convert to meaningful business relationships at rates exponentially higher than social media followers.
The SEO benefits are substantial but secondary. Medium articles consistently rank for industry keywords I could never compete for with a standalone blog. This organic discovery drives qualified traffic for years after publication.
Why TikTok?
TikTok selection raised eyebrows among my business network. The platform’s association with Gen Z dance videos masks its evolution into the most sophisticated content discovery engine ever built.
TikTok’s algorithm is uniquely meritocratic. Unlike Instagram or LinkedIn, where existing follower counts heavily influence reach, TikTok evaluates each video independently. Quality content from unknown creators regularly outperforms established accounts. This creates unprecedented opportunity for rapid audience building.
The platform forces content optimization in ways other platforms don’t. TikTok’s brutal completion rate requirements eliminate fluff, sharpen messaging, and improve storytelling efficiency. These skills transfer directly to other platforms and business communications.
Demographics tell the real story. TikTok’s fastest-growing segment is professionals aged 25–44. The platform is becoming the primary video discovery engine for business content, especially for audiences who’ve abandoned traditional media consumption patterns.
Most importantly, TikTok teaches pattern recognition for viral content mechanics. Understanding what drives shares, saves, and comments on TikTok improves content performance across all platforms.
Why YouTube?
YouTube operates as the internet’s second-largest search engine. Unlike social media platforms where content disappears into algorithmic black holes after 48 hours, YouTube videos can generate traffic for decades.
The platform’s monetization infrastructure is unmatched.
Ad revenue, channel memberships, Super Chat, merchandise integration — YouTube provides more revenue streams than any other platform.
Once you hit basic thresholds, the platform pays you to create content.
YouTube’s watch time algorithm rewards educational and entertaining content over clickbait.
This alignment incentivizes creating genuinely valuable content rather than engagement bait, building sustainable audience relationships.
The platform’s search functionality creates evergreen traffic opportunities. My three-year-old videos still generate daily views and business inquiries. This compound effect is impossible to replicate on feed-based platforms.
YouTube’s embedding capabilities extend content lifespan across the internet. Videos become marketing assets for websites, presentations, and email campaigns. The content works across multiple contexts without additional creation effort.
My Strategy
These three platforms create multiplicative effects rather than additive ones.
Medium articles become YouTube video scripts.
TikTok videos become YouTube Shorts.
YouTube concepts become Medium deep-dives. The content creation becomes circular and efficient.
Each platform serves different audience discovery patterns. TikTok captures attention-driven browsing.
YouTube serves intent-driven searching. Medium attracts expertise-driven reading. Together, they cover the complete content consumption spectrum.
The platforms also provide audience development redundancy. Algorithm changes or platform policy shifts can’t destroy your entire audience base when it’s distributed across different corporate entities and content formats.
The Resource Allocation Reality
Solopreneurs face brutal resource constraints.
Even with AI’s media scaling powers, it can limit quality of the output which can reverse growth and trust. Few get their fix from generative AI slop.
Every deliberate hour spent creating content for Platform A is an hour not invested in Platforms B through Z.
The opportunity cost calculations are straightforward: excel at three things or be mediocre at everything.
Content creation quality, particularly long-form and video, follows attention allocation patterns.
Your best content emerges when you deeply understand your audience, platform mechanics, and optimization strategies.
This understanding requires sustained focus impossible to achieve across numerous platforms.
The mental overhead of managing multiple platforms creates decision fatigue that degrades creative output.
Remembering posting schedules, content formats, audience preferences, and platform-specific best practices across six, let alone nine channels exhausts cognitive resources better spent on human-targeted content quality.
The Anti-Fragile Approach
Concentrating on three platforms actually reduces risk rather than increasing it. Each platform operates in different content categories (long-form, short-form, video), reducing correlation risk from algorithmic changes or competitive pressures.
The three-platform approach also enables rapid pivoting when opportunities emerge.
If TikTok announces major algorithm changes, I can temporarily shift focus to YouTube and Medium without abandoning established audiences.
This focused strategy creates sustainable competitive advantages. While competitors chase every new platform launch, you’re building compound expertise that becomes increasingly difficult to replicate.
The Contrarian Bet
The content creation industry promotes platform proliferation because it sells courses, tools, and consulting services.
More platforms equal more complexity, which equals more products to sell overwhelmed creators.
The most successful content creators I know privately admit to focusing on 2–3 platforms while publicly promoting omnipresence strategies.
This disconnect reveals the gap between what works and what markets.
Choose Wisely, Choose for You
The specific platforms matter less than the strategic approach.
Select one long-form platform for authority building, one social platform for audience development, and one video platform for algorithmic discovery.
Master these completely before considering expansion.
The three-platform rule isn’t about limitation — it’s about acceleration. By focusing your creative energy on platforms you can genuinely master, you build sustainable competitive advantages that compound over years rather than dilute over months.
Your audience would rather follow one expert than ten generalists.
A Shameless Plug
I’m excited to share my new book “People Over Pixels: Using Commercial Anthropology to Reconnect Business and Brands with Humanity.” It’s free to download on Saturday June 7th to Sunday, June 8th, 2025 (and always free with Kindle Unlimited).
Each chapter works as a standalone guide, so you can jump straight to whatever interests you — whether it’s understanding real human behavior beyond the data or building brands that actually connect.
So, if my essay struck a chord and you have an opportunity to grab the book, I’d really appreciate an honest Amazon review as a small favor.
Real reader perspectives matter more than algorithms (which is kind of the whole point!).