Choosing platforms: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest

What you will be able to do

• Match each major social platform to the buying stage and client type it serves best
• Score candidate platforms against your buyers, your content and your available hours
• Assign each chosen platform a single job with a measurable result

You do not need to be everywhere. You need to be where your buyers look when they are deciding, with enough consistency that what they find looks alive. For most event businesses that means one main platform, one supporting platform and, at most, one experiment.

Read the transcript

Choosing platforms: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest.

You do not need to be everywhere.

You need to be where your buyers look when they are deciding, with enough consistency that what they find looks alive.

Start with the buyer, not the platform.

Every platform choice should begin with three questions about the person who signs your contract.

Where do they go when they first realize they need someone like you?

What each platform does well.

Each platform has a natural job.

Fight that job and you will work twice as hard for half the result.

Score your options in twenty minutes.

Give each platform a score from 1 to 5 on four questions, then multiply.

Multiplying rather than adding means a zero anywhere kills the option, which is what you want.

Worked example: Lantern and Lane picks its platforms.

Priya and Marco run Lantern and Lane, a two-person planning studio in Toronto's west end.

About 84 percent of their revenue is weddings and milestone parties, and about 16 percent is small corporate events: holiday parties, client dinners and offsites.

Give each platform one job.

A platform without a job becomes a chore.

Write one sentence for each chosen platform that names its job and the number that proves it is working.

That is the lesson. The worksheet and the quiz are just below this video.

Start with the buyer, not the platform

Every platform choice should begin with three questions about the person who signs your contract. Where do they go when they first realize they need someone like you? Where do they go to check you out after they hear your name? And where do they spend idle time when they are not looking for anything at all?

The answers are different for a bride in Vaughan, an HR coordinator on Bay Street and a festival programmer in Hamilton. The bride may save hundreds of ideas on Pinterest months before she contacts anyone, then scroll your Instagram grid at midnight to see whether your work matches her board. The HR coordinator may never open Instagram for work. She will look at your LinkedIn page, your website and your Google reviews, because she has to defend the choice to her manager. The festival programmer wants to see a full act on YouTube before he books it.

So the question is not which platform is biggest. It is which platform sits on the path between your buyer’s first thought and your inquiry form.

What each platform does well

Each platform has a natural job. Fight that job and you will work twice as hard for half the result.

Two notes on the table. First, Instagram is the default check-out platform for most consumer-facing event businesses, so even if it is not your main discovery channel, keep it presentable. Second, YouTube and Pinterest behave more like search engines than feeds. A good video or pin can bring inquiries for years, while a feed post is mostly gone in days.

Score your options in twenty minutes

Give each platform a score from 1 to 5 on four questions, then multiply. Multiplying rather than adding means a zero anywhere kills the option, which is what you want.

1. Buyer presence. Do the people who sign your contracts use this platform while deciding? Ask your last ten clients if you are unsure.
2. Content fit. Can you produce the kind of content this platform rewards, from the work you already do?
3. Hours available. Can you sustain the minimum rhythm through your busiest month?
4. Proof of intent. Have you ever had an inquiry that started here, or seen a competitor clearly booking from it?

Worked example: Lantern & Lane picks its platforms

Priya and Marco run Lantern & Lane, a two-person planning studio in Toronto’s west end. About 84 percent of their revenue is weddings and milestone parties, and about 16 percent is small corporate events: holiday parties, client dinners and offsites. Here is how they scored each platform.

The result is clear. Instagram is the main platform, run by Priya, because it is where couples check them out. LinkedIn is the supporting platform, run by Marco from his personal profile, because corporate buyers want to see a person they can trust. Pinterest is the experiment for one season, because they already have the wedding photos and pins can link straight to their service pages.

TikTok and Facebook are not banned forever. Lantern & Lane keeps the business name reserved on both, posts nothing, and adds a line to the profile directing people to Instagram. YouTube waits until they have a reason to make long video.

Give each platform one job

A platform without a job becomes a chore. Write one sentence for each chosen platform that names its job and the number that proves it is working. Copy this template:

• Platform: Instagram
• Job: Convince couples who already know our name that our weddings look like theirs could.
• Proof it works: Inquiries per month where the client says they found or checked us on Instagram.
• Minimum rhythm: Three feed posts and stories on four days a week.
• Owner: Priya.

Notice that the proof is inquiries, not followers. Followers are a cost of doing business, not the result. A caterer with 900 local followers who reliably sends four corporate lunch inquiries a month has a better account than one with 20,000 followers who sends none.

Vendor examples

• A wedding DJ in Mississauga might choose TikTok for discovery, because short clips of packed dance floors travel, and Instagram as the check-out page.
• A corporate magician might choose LinkedIn first, with YouTube holding a three-minute reel that planners can send to their bosses.
• A rental company might choose Instagram and Pinterest, with every pin linking to the matching item in its catalogue.
• A wedding photographer in Burlington might choose Instagram as the main platform and Pinterest as the supporting one, because couples save galleries to their boards and click through to the photographer’s own site when they are ready to compare packages.
• A banquet hall might keep Facebook as a main platform, because the families who book milestone birthdays and anniversaries use it daily.

In Canada and the GTA

The GTA is one of the most linguistically diverse markets in the country, and that shapes platform choice more than national averages do. Many families plan weddings, religious celebrations and milestone birthdays in group chats on WhatsApp or similar messaging apps, then share vendor accounts from Instagram or Facebook into those chats. If your clients come from communities where that is normal, make sure your profile link and contact details work well when someone forwards them to an aunt who has never heard of you. A clear name, a phone number and one link to your website travel better than a clever bio.

Corporate buying in Toronto clusters around the downtown core, the Financial District, the airport corridor and the office parks of Markham, Mississauga and Oakville. These buyers research on LinkedIn and the web during business hours. Holiday party planning often starts in late summer and early fall, and offsites cluster in spring and fall, so a LinkedIn presence that goes quiet from June to September misses the window when December parties are being decided.

Wedding planning runs on a longer cycle. Couples typically book key vendors months ahead, and the winter wedding show season in the GTA is when many begin seriously comparing vendors. Pinterest and Instagram activity in January and February matters more than in August, when you are busiest and least likely to post.

Rules that follow you onto every platform

Public posts and DMs are treated differently under Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). The CRTC says that, in general, CASL does not apply to the one-way general broadcast of a commercial message on social media, such as a post on your page. Messages sent through a closed, two-way direct messaging system, such as Facebook Messenger or LinkedIn messaging, can qualify as messages sent to an electronic address, and the CRTC says this is decided case by case. In practice, answering someone who messaged you first is ordinary customer service. Sending cold sales pitches by DM to people you have no relationship with is where CASL risk begins. The CRTC’s CASL frequently asked questions set out the test.

Advertising rules apply on every platform equally. The Competition Act prohibits representations to the public that are false or misleading in a material respect, and that includes captions, reels and profile claims. If your bio says “Toronto’s top-rated planner”, you need to be able to prove it. Ad Standards’ Canadian Code of Advertising Standards adds that an ad must not be presented in a format that conceals the fact that it is an advertisement, which matters when you start paying creators.

Music is a specific trap on TikTok. TikTok says businesses should use its Commercial Music Library, a pre-cleared library that is free for businesses on TikTok, and that businesses cannot use the general music library for commercial purposes, whether organic posts, ads or branded content. See TikTok’s Commercial Music Library help page. A wedding DJ posting a clip with the current chart hit in the background is exactly the business account this rule is written for.

French and national reach. Most GTA event businesses market in English, but if you take work in Ottawa, eastern Ontario or Quebec, consider a few French posts or a French line in your bio. Quebec has its own language rules for businesses, so get advice before you target Quebec clients directly. Within Ontario, a bilingual profile is a courtesy that some government and association clients notice.

Finally, reserve your business name on every major platform, even the ones you will not use. It costs nothing, prevents confusion, and gives you a clean handle if you add a platform later.

Worksheet

Download the worksheet and complete it for your own business, using Lantern & Lane as the model where it helps. Keep it with your marketing plan. It takes about 10 minutes.

Download the worksheet (PDF)