X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, platform by platform

Four platforms, four audiences, and one specimen post each so you can see the difference rather than read about it. Nobody approves an account and nobody checks your credentials before you post.

This page dates faster than anything else here, which is why it is reviewed every six months. Where it disagrees with your own screen, the platform moved. The durable version sits in making something capable of spreading.

Before you set out to be seen. An audience on this subject arrives with a hostile audience attached, growing at the same rate. Each platform below says what it costs you personally, and the handling is in answering hostile replies.

X

Who is there. Reporters, political staff, academics, campaigners, and a permanent argument most of them came for on purpose.

What travels. Short text, one claim, the document quoted, the link underneath. Reach here arrives through people quoting you with a hostile comment attached, so the post has to survive being read by somebody hunting for the flaw. About half of what fills a For You timeline comes from accounts the reader does not follow, which is X’s own published figure, so a post with forty followers behind it is not confined to those forty.

Weak: “Absolutely vile antisemitism from this account. Report and block.”

Strong: “Article 32 of the 1988 Hamas covenant cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by name. It’s on Yale Law School’s site, in English, free.”

The rule underneath: give them the document, not your reaction to it. The second one is quotable by somebody who has never heard of you. The first tells the reader only how you feel.

What dies. The nine-part thread. Most people who meant to read to the end did not, and the point was in part seven.

What it costs you. This is the platform where a quote-post puts you in front of thousands of people looking for a Jew to make an example of. Screenshot before you engage, not after.

Instagram

Who is there. People looking at friends and at subjects they chose. They came to look, not to argue.

What travels. One idea carried by an image or a short video, legible with the sound off, explanation underneath for whoever wants it. A third of people say they watch on mute. Keep video under three minutes, because Instagram publishes that anything longer is not recommended to people who do not already follow you. Most of what happens to a good post is invisible to you: it gets saved and forwarded privately to one person.

“‘From the river to the sea.’ Two borders. Everything between them is Israel. I’ve asked four people this week which river they mean and what happens to the people living in between. No answer yet.”

That works here because it is one idea, it fits on a card, and somebody can send it to a friend without joining an argument.

What dies. The eight-slide carousel that needs all eight slides to make one point.

What it costs you. The argument moves into your direct messages, where the abuse lands unseen by anybody who could support you. Screenshot those too.

Facebook

Who is there. Older on average, and present for family, local life and groups. This is where the people physically near you are.

What travels. A plain post from a person with a face, about something that happened where they live, in the words they would use out loud.

“I’ve lived on Ravenswood Road for twenty-two years. On Tuesday somebody sprayed the door of our synagogue. I’m not asking anyone to take a side on the Middle East. I’m asking whether you’ll stand outside with us for twenty minutes on Sunday at eleven.”

Three things make that work: a street, a date, and an ask small enough for somebody with no view about any of it.

What dies. A national argument dropped into a local group, and anything reading like an organisation’s statement.

What it costs you. Posting locally tells your street that you are Jewish and where your building is. For most people that is a trade worth making, and it is a decision rather than a side effect.

TikTok

Who is there. People who came to be entertained and watch whatever arrives. Most neither know nor care whose video it is.

What travels. One person talking to camera about one specific thing, point in the first line, no wind-up.

Weak: “In this video we’ll be exploring five common myths about antisemitism.”

Strong: “Someone asked me yesterday why Jews always bring up the Holocaust. It’s a fair question and I’ve got thirty seconds.”

The rule underneath: open on the real question somebody actually asked you. The first version announces a lesson, and people leave during an announcement.

What dies. Anything resembling an advertisement, a still graphic with a voiceover, and anything visibly made for somewhere else.

What it costs you. A face and a first name is enough to identify you. This is the harshest of the four when it turns, because the crowd arriving has no relationship with you at all.

Building an audience from nothing

Slow, and for months mostly disappointing. You will post things you are proud of to almost nobody. That is the normal shape of it.

Post at a rate you can hold for a year. Twice a week sustained beats a furious fortnight. Pick the rate you could keep in a bad month.

Reply to people rather than broadcasting. Being useful in other people’s replies is how anybody finds a new account. Where this backfires: some people spend a year in other people’s replies and build nothing of their own.

Be useful before you are persuasive. The account people follow is the one that explained something they needed explaining.

Two hundred people who work in the places you care about beat twenty thousand who already agree and do nothing.

The mechanics of that, meaning joint posts, which replies get you found, and what to post while forty people are reading, are in how a small account gets seen.

Buying or inflating followers

No. Not bought, not follow-for-follow, not a group of you boosting each other, not a second account amplifying the first.

The number is the only thing you gain and the number is not the asset. Inflated accounts are recognisable, and on this subject people are hunting for a reason to dismiss you.

Your own name, or not

A personal account persuades more. An organisation account is safer. Both are true and the trade is real.

Nobody can make this call for you, so here is the question that decides it. If the account were tied to your legal name by lunchtime tomorrow, what changes? Where the answer names an employer, a landlord, a visa or a custody arrangement, that fact is deciding it rather than your appetite for the argument.

A consistent name that is not your legal name sits in between. It is not anonymity, and a determined person will undo it.

Run the number of accounts you can sustain, which for most people is one.

Cross-posting the same thing everywhere

It underperforms, and you can see why in your own feed. A post carries the marks of where it was made, and audiences recognise a visitor.

Take the idea rather than the post, and rebuild it where you are actually present.

Before you post anything this week

Fill in the blanks136 words

Set up first, tonight: name the one platform you are using for the next three months and the job you want it doing. List ten accounts there worth replying to.

If it is Sunday evening, then I will write the two posts for the coming week and save them, so a bad Wednesday does not break the run.

If I have posted for six weeks and almost nobody has seen it, then I will keep the rate and rewrite the opening lines, rather than deciding it failed.

If I open the app to check the follower number, then I will close it and go and reply to three people instead.

If a post of mine starts moving and the replies turn hostile, then I will stop replying and open the hostile replies guide before typing anything.