Using Social Media to Reach the Right People, Not Just More People
By Jadeverett MayhornUpdated 3 min readBusiness
A post that reaches a hundred thousand people who forget it by tomorrow is worth less than a post that reaches five hundred people who remember exactly who you are. Reach without recall doesn't build a business.
Social media strategy for a purpose-driven business gets treated like a numbers game, more followers, more reach, more impressions tracked obsessively in a dashboard. Those numbers can grow steadily while the business itself doesn't, because reach isn't the same thing as connection with the right people, and a business is built on connection, not on impressions.
Say Something Specific, Not Something Safe
Generic inspirational content blends into an endless feed of nearly identical posts saying nearly identical things in nearly identical language. A specific point of view, even one that some people disagree with, is what actually gets remembered, shared, and followed by people who feel like you're speaking directly to them rather than reciting a template everyone else in your space is also reciting.
This requires a tolerance for some people disliking or disagreeing with what you post, which feels risky to a lot of business owners trained to avoid controversy at all costs. But a message safe enough to offend nobody is usually also forgettable enough to move nobody, which is the actual risk being avoided by playing it too safe.
Treat Comments and DMs as the Actual Relationship
The follower count is a vanity number, visible to anyone glancing at your profile but disconnected from actual business outcomes. The people who actually comment, reply, and message you are the ones building a real relationship with your work, and that relationship is what eventually converts, not the passive scrolling of a much larger, uninvolved audience.
Businesses that treat their comment section and DMs as a genuine relationship-building space, responding thoughtfully rather than ignoring engagement in favor of just posting more content, tend to build a noticeably more loyal audience over time than businesses chasing raw reach alone.
Point People Somewhere You Own
Social platforms are rented space, subject to algorithm changes and policy shifts entirely outside your control. Every post should have some path, direct or eventual, toward your email list or your own website, somewhere the relationship isn't subject to an algorithm change overnight erasing years of accumulated audience attention.
This doesn't mean every single post needs an explicit call to action. It means the overall strategy consistently nudges engaged followers toward an owned channel over time, rather than leaving the entire relationship permanently dependent on a platform that owes you nothing.
Consistency Beats Frequency
Posting constantly with no consistent voice or theme tends to build less recognition than posting less often but always in a way that's immediately identifiable as coming from you specifically. Recognition, over volume, is what actually builds the kind of following that remembers you when they're ready to buy.
This is particularly true for a purpose-driven business, where the actual differentiator is rarely the content format and almost always the specific voice and perspective behind it.
Reaching your actual tribe beats reaching a bigger, less connected crowd every time it comes down to who actually buys.
Choosing Platforms Deliberately
Being active on every available platform simultaneously usually produces mediocre presence everywhere rather than strong presence anywhere, spreading limited time and attention too thin to build real depth on any single channel. Choosing one or two platforms where your actual audience already spends time, and building real depth there, consistently outperforms a scattered, shallow presence across five or six platforms at once.
This requires an honest assessment of where your specific audience actually is, rather than defaulting to whichever platform feels most exciting or most talked about within your own industry circles, which may not overlap with where your actual customers spend their attention.
What Depth Actually Looks Like Over Time
A year of consistent, specific, engaged presence on one platform builds a fundamentally different asset than a year of scattered, inconsistent posting across five platforms. The engaged audience on the single platform knows you, trusts you, and converts at a meaningfully higher rate than a larger but shallower audience spread across multiple channels where none of them have really gotten to know you well.
This is worth remembering the next time platform envy sets in, watching a competitor's presence on a channel you haven't built yet. Depth on your current channel is usually a better investment than starting from zero on an additional one.
A real Website Growth System gives social media somewhere real to send people, instead of a link that goes nowhere useful.
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