If you are going to spend months growing one social channel from zero, which one pays you back? I pulled the real numbers on nine channels across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and X (Twitter): how much reach a brand-new account gets, how many hours a post costs, how long each post keeps working, and how much of it turns into a customer. If you would rather pay for reach than grow it, I have separate write-ups on Meta ad auctions, Google ads and finding influencers.
The short version: There is no single best platform, only a best one for your product and your hours. TikTok gives the strongest reach to strangers from zero, YouTube is the only channel whose posts still earn a year later, Facebook Groups reach 5 to 10 times more people than a Page, and LinkedIn beats everything for B2B and almost nothing else. Facebook Pages and X are not worth growing for free.
Everything depends on whether strangers see your post
Five things decide whether a platform is worth your months, and the first two are both called reach:
- Reach to strangers is the algorithm showing your post to people who have never heard of you, and it is the only thing that grows a brand-new account.
- Reach to your own audience is the share of the followers you already earned who see a given post, and it runs from 40% of members on one platform to 1.4% of followers on another, for identical content.
- Effort per post separates a 7 hour YouTube video from a phone-shot TikTok, so posting consistently costs wildly different amounts of your life on each platform.
- Shelf life decides whether one post keeps being found for a year or dies in 48 hours, which is the difference between an asset and a treadmill.
- Conversion is whether the reach turns into a click, a sign-up or a sale, and the link friction differs enormously between platforms.
Move the sliders to weight those five for your own case.
The ranking is a weighted model built from the figures cited throughout this article. It is a decision aid, not a guarantee.
The nine channels in brief, and where to read each one in full
Each channel has its own page with the data and the caveats. Here is the one-line version, in the order of the table below.
YouTube
The slowest and most expensive channel to build, at 7 to 10 hours a video and months to a year of ramp, and the only one whose posts still earn traffic years later. Read the full breakdown →
TikTok
The only place a 100-follower account can reach a million people, because the For You feed judges the video rather than the account, paid for with a 48 hour shelf life and near-daily posting. Read the full breakdown →
Instagram Reels
The best discovery engine on Meta, with about 55% of Reel views coming from people who do not follow you, and no working link anywhere near a Reel. Read the full breakdown →
Facebook Pages
Organic reach fell from roughly 16% of followers in 2012 to about 1.4% today, so keep a Page as a support and reviews hub and spend no organic hours growing it. Read the full breakdown →
Facebook Groups
Groups reach 40 to 50% of their members against a Page's 1.4%, roughly 5 to 10 times the reach for identical content, and the bill arrives as daily community management rather than production hours. Read the full breakdown →
LinkedIn
The one major platform where organic reach has not collapsed, with personal profiles still reaching 20 to 40% of connections, superb for B2B and poor for a broad consumer brand. Read the full breakdown →
X (Twitter)
Paying does buy reach, lifting a post from under 100 views free to about 600 at $8 a month and about 1,550 at $40 a month, which is still below the 2,711 views an average X post gets, and links stay buried at every tier. Read the full breakdown →
Reels and Shorts, across all four surfaces
Short video genuinely shows you to strangers on every surface, and turns roughly 0.1 to 2% of those views into followers, so a million views is usually a few hundred to a few thousand people. Read the full breakdown →
Growing by replying instead of posting
On X and LinkedIn you can grow by replying to other people instead of publishing your own content, which needs no audience to begin with and is the cheapest cold-start lever there is. Read the full breakdown →
The whole comparison in one glance
Green is a strength, red is a weakness, amber is in between.
| Platform | Cold reach from zero | Grow by replying? (gain followers from replies) | Effort per post | Time to an audience | Shelf life | Clickable links? (promote your brand) | Burned-in promo text penalised? (on-screen "search X in the App Store") | Geo-lock: does it show you to your own country first? | Converts off-platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube | Strong (Shorts + Search) | No, comments do not spread you | Highest, 7 to 10 hrs | Slowest, months to 1yr+ | Best, months to years | Yes, description links work (long-form) | No, no rule against on-screen text; description links work anyway | Weakest, topic and search decide, so videos travel worldwide | Best, high intent, can demo |
| TikTok | Strongest, ignores followers | Sometimes, viral top comments | Low, often < 1 hr | Fastest, weeks to months | Worst, ~48 hrs | No, bio link only, in-app browser | No rule against it, but a sales pitch up front makes people swipe away, so it gets shown to fewer people | Strongest, the first test batch is mostly your own country, and it crosses over only if that batch watches | OK, 3.4% bio, browser friction |
| Instagram Reels | Good, 55% non-followers | Barely, low comment reach | Medium, 1 to 3 hrs | Medium, 3 to 6 months | Semi-evergreen, ~14 days | No, one bio link, links suppressed | No rule against it, but a sales pitch up front makes people swipe away, and there is no clickable link to use instead | Moderate, it leans on where your existing followers are, so it shifts as they do | Weak, < 1% link, suppressed |
| Facebook Page | Almost none, ~1.4% | No | Low to medium | Very slow, often stalls | Shortest, 5 to 6 hrs | Clickable, but demoted | No, though 1.4% reach caps it either way | Not a factor, posts go to your own followers wherever they live | Negligible, links demoted |
| Facebook Reels | High, the main FB discovery surface | No, comments carry no follow path | Near-zero as a cross-post, 1 to 3 hrs to originate | Medium, 3 to 6 months | Semi-evergreen, days to weeks | Yes, clickable, right in the first comment | No, and you rarely need it, the first comment takes a real link | Moderate, follows your Page's existing audience before it widens | Best of the short surfaces, but a passive audience |
| Facebook Group | High to members, 40 to 50% | In-group only, reply as a person, not brand followers | Lowest, 5 to 30 min | Moderate, months | Good, threads resurface | Yes, clickable to a warm audience | No, and unnecessary, plain links work here | Not a factor, your members are whoever you recruited | Strong, warm community |
| LinkedIn (personal) | Best of audience, 20 to 40% | Strong, a primary input | Low text, high carousel | Fast, 2 to 4 months | Good, days to a week | Clickable, but cuts reach; use comments | No, the reach cost here is on actual links, not text | Moderate, your own network sees it first, and that is usually local | Best B2B / poor consumer |
| X (free) | Almost none, under 100 views/post | Works, but free replies rank low | Low, text in minutes | Near-impossible, free is throttled | Worst, ~43 min, then it stops spreading | Clickable, but link posts get buried (~0% reach) | No, and it is a genuine workaround, since real links get buried | Weak, English posts travel, though a free account is barely seen anywhere | Negligible, links ~0%, near-dead |
| X (paid, Premium) | Bought, ~10x free, ~600/post but still modest | Strong, Premium surfaces replies | Low, text in minutes (plus ~$8/mo) | Faster if you pay, still gated | Worst, ~43 min, then it stops spreading (paying does not change this) | Clickable but heavily suppressed, link posts barely reach anyone; use first reply | No, same workaround, link posts stay suppressed | Weak, English posts travel worldwide once you have paid for reach | Weak, link penalty eased not removed (~0.3%) |
Naming your app on screen is allowed everywhere and still costs you reach
This is the most commonly misremembered rule in the table above, so it is worth being exact about.
- No platform publishes a rule against on-screen text naming your own product, so burning "search my app in the App Store" into a video breaks nothing on any of them.
- The rule people half-remember is the watermark one, which is about re-uploading a clip that still carries another app's logo and is covered in do Reels and Shorts actually grow you.
- These feeds decide how widely to push a video mainly on how long people keep watching before they scroll away, pushing it to a small batch first and widening only if that batch stays.
- A clip that opens like an advert gets scrolled past sooner, so it stops being shown and the reach falls with no rule broken.
- Put the ask at the end of the video rather than the start, and keep it small or just say it out loud.
Your country only decides who sees your video first, not who can see it
The last column of the table worries people more than it should.
- Every one of these feeds shows a new post to a small batch of people first, and your own country is simply the cheapest guess at who might care.
- If that first batch keeps watching, the video crosses borders anyway, so your country is a head start rather than a wall.
- Language does more of the work than the country does, which is why posting in English from Australia or Ireland travels far better than posting in Portuguese from Brazil.
- A large share of the writing claiming your videos are trapped in your country is published by companies selling VPNs and foreign SIM cards to fix it.
- If you specifically want a US audience, the levers that work are US topics and references, posting while the US is awake, and getting your first few hundred followers there.
Match the channel to who you are and what you sell
Grow the platform that fits your product, your appetite for making video, and how patient you can be.
- If you sell a B2B or professional tool, grow a LinkedIn personal profile first, because nothing else here comes close on either reach or conversion for your buyer.
- If you live in tech, finance or building in public, X can still build authority through replies, but treat it as a paid channel and never rely on it for off-site clicks.
- If you have a consumer brand and can make short video, grow TikTok or YouTube Shorts for cheap reach from zero, and add YouTube long-form if your product is better shown than described.
- If you can make video but want each piece to last, lean YouTube over TikTok, trading fast disposable reach for a searchable library that keeps working over a year.
- If you hate being on camera, grow a small Facebook Group about one subject, which has the lowest production cost of anything here and charges you in daily community management instead.
- If you only have a Facebook Page, stop growing it organically and put those hours into a Group, short video or paid reach.
- Pick one or two platforms and go deep, because every one of them rewards consistency over months and punishes posting everywhere at once.
A worked example with no budget and no time to waste
Picture a small consumer brand or solo creator with a product that is easy to show and no money for ads.
- LinkedIn is out as a growth channel, because the audience is at work and job-title targeting does nothing for a broad consumer product.
- X is out too, because $8 a month lifts a post from under 100 views to only about 600, and a paying account's link posts still get about a third of the replies and likes its plain text posts get.
- Short video comes first, because a product whose value is a five-second visual is exactly what a TikTok or a YouTube Short does well.
- YouTube long-form is the compounding bet, because a how-to video that matches what people search keeps pulling visitors for months.
- A small Facebook Group about one subject beats a Page for any Facebook presence at all, for the warm community and the 5 to 10 times more reach.
- Skip organic Facebook Page posting entirely, because 1.4% feed reach is not worth a single hour you could spend on a Short.
Conclusion: which social platform is worth growing, in one glance
Nine channels, ranked by how much each one gives back for the hours you put in.
- No social platform is best overall, only a best one for your product and your hours.
- TikTok gives the strongest reach to strangers from zero, and its posts stop being found after about 48 hours.
- YouTube costs 7 to 10 hours a video and keeps pulling viewers for years.
- Facebook Groups reach 40 to 50% of their members against a Page's 1.4%, so grow a Group and not a Page.
- LinkedIn is the best channel for a B2B buyer and a poor one for a broad consumer brand.
- X gives a free account under 100 median impressions a post, so it is not worth growing without paying.
- Pick one or two channels, post there for months, and judge them on clicks and sign-ups rather than views.