The Room You Chose

A few weeks ago I wrote "Finding Your Room" and told you to pick a platform and commit. Find your room. Learn its language. Speak to the people who came ready to listen.

I've been rethinking it.

Not because the rooms are wrong. LinkedIn really is where professional conversations happen. Instagram really is the gallery. That part holds up. What I missed was the cost of the advice itself. "Find your room" assumes you can walk between them freely. Most people can't, and the reason goes deeper than habit.

Your Platform Is Your Personality

Researchers at Michigan State studied why people gravitate toward specific platforms, and the answer isn't strategy.¹ It's psychology. Instagram draws visual thinkers, the people who process the world in images and composition. X attracts verbal sparrers who think through argument and text. Facebook is where people go when they want a little of everything, community woven through content. TikTok captures the audiovisual storytellers.

These aren't random preferences. They're cognitive styles made visible. The platform that feels like home feels that way because it matches how you naturally think.

We find the door that matches how we see.

Which means telling a visual thinker to "just go to LinkedIn" is like telling a sculptor to start writing essays. They can do it. But they're leaving their native language behind, and the work feels different.

The Cost of Leaving

Here's what I underestimated. When researchers tracked academics trying to leave X for Bluesky, only 18% actually made the transition.² The rest stayed, even the unhappy ones. Every connection, every follower, every conversation thread represents years of quiet investment. Walking away from that isn't a strategy pivot. It's a loss.

The instinct, then, is to hedge. Post everywhere. Cover all the rooms.

But that doesn't work either. Cross-posted content consistently underperforms material created natively for each platform.³ Algorithms reward what feels organic. The same post pasted across five feeds reads like a flyer taped to every telephone pole in town. People notice. They scroll past.

Learning to Visit

Learning the language of a room that isn't yours.

So what do you actually do? I keep coming back to this: your room isn't the problem. The problem is assuming your clients are in it with you.

For B2B consultants and service providers, LinkedIn is where professional buyers actually spend their time vetting vendors.⁴ But if your creative instinct lives on Instagram or your professional network grew up on Facebook, I'm not going to tell you to abandon it.

I'm going to tell you to learn to be a guest. Not cross-posting your carousels, but learning how people read and respond in the room where your clients actually gather. Showing up as yourself, translated.

The room you chose isn't wrong. It's yours. But your clients chose a room too, and it might not be the same one.

I told you to find your room. I should have said: find yours, then learn to visit theirs.

---

References

Footnotes

1. Alhabash, S., et al. (2024). "So Similar, Yet So Different: How Motivations to Use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok Predict Problematic Use and Use Continuance Intentions." SAGE Open ↩

2. Quelle, D., Denker, F., Garg, P., & Bovet, A. (2025). "Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky." arXiv ↩

3. ShortVids. (2026). "The Complete Social Media Growth Guide for 2026." ShortVids ↩

4. Martal Group. (2026). "LinkedIn Statistics 2026: Social Selling Insights for Sales Leaders." Martal Group ↩