Picture it: it’s Sunday evening, you’re curled up on the couch scrolling Instagram, and you land on a page with 40,000 followers, thousands of likes on every post and a new trending sound every day. Then you open your own page and that little voice starts up: am I doing this all wrong?
Let me put your mind at ease. You’re probably not. That page is simply playing a different game from yours.
Why a creator’s numbers aren’t your yardstick
For a creator, the page is the product. Growth is their income: more followers means bigger brand deals, more course sales and a bigger audience to earn from. Those numbers you were measuring yourself against are measuring their kind of success, not yours.
Your Facebook business page, Instagram or LinkedIn business page has a different, and honestly far more practical, job. It’s there to bring the right people to your door. That changes everything about what a good result looks like. A business with 2,000 engaged local followers will often do better than one with 40,000 followers scattered across the world who have never heard of the product. I’d take the 2,000 every time.
South Africa isn’t the US, and that’s okay
So much of the social media advice out there is written with American creators in mind. Instagram has around 172 million users in the US. Here at home it has about 9.5 million, roughly 15% of the population, while Facebook reaches more than half of all South Africans.
And then there’s WhatsApp, the app most of us couldn’t get through a day without. In 2026, 92.5% of South African internet users aged 16 and over said they’d used it in the previous month. Your customers are spread across platforms in a very different way, so a copy-and-paste overseas playbook simply won’t find them.
Don’t overlook LinkedIn
If you sell to other businesses, LinkedIn may be the most underrated platform you have. South Africa has about 19 million LinkedIn members, roughly 30% of the population. That’s about twice as many as Instagram.
LinkedIn is where decision-makers go to think about work. Architects, developers, procurement managers and business owners are already there, in a professional frame of mind. You won’t need trending sounds or polished reels. A real photo of a finished project, an honest lesson from your week, or a short post about how you solved a client’s problem often travels further than you’d expect. It’s also a lovely place to let your own personality and expertise shine, because people buy from people.
LinkedIn won’t suit every business. If you mostly sell to homeowners and shoppers, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will probably do more of the work. If your best clients are other businesses, though, it deserves a regular spot in your plan. Start with a LinkedIn business page for your company, then share from your own profile too, because posts from a real person often reach more people than posts from a company page.
Start your social media strategy with the right goal
Most social media goals fall into one of three groups: awareness, engagement and conversion. Your page will usually do best when one of them takes the lead, because each one shapes what you post.
A visibility page introduces you to people who don’t know you yet. Here, reach and new followers matter most.
A community page keeps your existing clients close and feeling looked after. Comments, saves and shares are your best signs that it’s working, and on LinkedIn, so are thoughtful replies and reposts from people in your industry.
An enquiry page turns attention into bookings and sales. Messages, form submissions and phone calls are what count.
My honest advice: pick one specific goal each quarter and write it as an outcome, such as a number of qualified leads. “Grow our following” sounds lovely, but it describes activity, not results.
The takeaway
A successful business page is simply one that does its job. Start with who you want to reach, what you’d love them to do and where they already spend their time. Once you know that, every post has a purpose, and you can stop comparing yourself to pages that were never playing your game in the first place.
If you’d like a hand building a social media strategy around your business, I’d love to chat. Drop me a line at erica@birdseyedigital.co.za or visit birdseyedigital.co.za.
