My normal advice for solo-founders is to focus on sales, rather than social media. In some cases however, social media is EXACTLY what your business needs, especially if it’s consumer-facing in some way. This includes 2-sided businesses such as marketplaces, communities, media companies etc (i.e. anything where you’re selling ads/sponsorships).

Why? It builds reputation, connections, awareness and leads all in one go.

Unfortunately, many people fall into several pitfalls which kill their chances as a solo-founder on social.

Here are 6 of the biggest mistakes to avoid:

1/ Don’t use a brand account

When you’re a solo-founder, using a personal account is usually more effective than a brand account as it feels more social and less “salesy”. It’s easier to create trust when they can see your face and hear your personality through your posts.

2/ Don’t post about multiple topics

Focus on only 1 topic for your entire account. It makes your account easier to follow, but also helps the algorithm know what you talk about so it can recommend your posts to others. This is true of most social networks. It’s much easier to say 1 thing over and over again in different ways, than try to talk about multiple topics. You can literally write 1 tweet about your main point and then ask Chat GPT for 50 different ways of saying it, and you’ve got the basis of 50 new tweets.

3/ Don’t make your bio complicated

Make your bio straight to the point about who you are and what you talk about (again, just 1 topic). This is the first thing people will see if they click your profile so you want to give them a clear reason to follow by demonstrating what value you give them. Make sure your banner and profile photo are high quality and look good on all devices.

4/ Don’t change your profile photo often

Your profile photo should be unique so that it stands out in people’s feeds and they will remember you. When you change it, don’t change it again for at least 6 months, but ideally longer. Otherwise you don’t give people a chance to get used to it and they will scroll past your posts.

5/ Don’t use every social network

I go against the advice of the popular social media influencers who suggest that you post on every platform 10 times a day. As a solo-business, you don’t have time for this, and unless your entire business is built around social media (for example if you’re a social media ghost writer, or you run a social-media course), you still have a lot of other things that you need to do during the day and you can’t dedicate your entire day to creating social media content. Instead, try them all and see where you get the most traction, then double-down on the ones that work. It’s very time consuming to do social media well, so focusing heavily on 1-2 platforms that work well is a more efficient use of time.

6/ Don’t come up with content from scratch

Instead of writing your posts from scratch, look at other content that has had a lot of likes or engagement and then copy the format. For Twitter and LinkedIn, you can copy the format of text and apply it to your industry. For visual channels like Instagram or TikTok, it can be a little more abstract, but you might find videos follow a certain template for example, where they might start with a question, then answer it, using specific cuts or filters etc. Ultimately you’re trying to avoid reinventing the wheel. 2 great tools for this are TweetHunter and Taplio that allow you to search for high quality tweets in your industry, or other industries and then use them as a starting point, where you can replicate the structure, but apply it to your own topic. This isn’t plagiarism, but instead just utilizing structures that hundreds of others are using.

Hope this was helpful?

I’m writing on this topic every week on Substack where I share 15 years of learnings in 3-min guides. Feel free to use those guides too if they’re useful.