There are now 54.8 million social media users in the UK. That’s roughly 79% of the total population. That number has barely moved in two years. The platforms are not growing significantly. The audience is not expanding. What is changing is how that audience uses them, and how much patience it has for content that doesn’t earn its attention.
According to Ofcom’s Online Nations Report, the average UK adult now spends one hour and 37 minutes per day on social media — down 11% from previous years. People are spending less time scrolling and being more selective about what they engage with when they do. For small organisations with limited resources, that shift is actually useful information. It means the question is no longer how to reach the largest possible audience. It is how to say something worth stopping for.
Most small organisations approach social media in the wrong order. They decide which platforms to be on, then figure out what to post, then wonder why it isn’t working. The right order is the reverse: start with what you are trying to achieve, establish who you are trying to reach and what they actually care about, then decide where and how to show up. That thinking — what a content strategy actually provides — is what separates social media that builds something from social media that simply maintains a presence.
The platform question matters less than most people think, and the data supports a more selective approach than most guides recommend. Research from Sprout Social found a significant disconnect between where UK marketers are investing their budgets and where UK consumers are actually spending their time. Marketers are concentrating heavily on TikTok and Instagram. Consumers point to Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp as the platforms where they are actually increasing time spent. For a small organisation without the resources to be everywhere at once, choosing two or three platforms based on where your specific audience is — rather than where the industry conversation is — is a more honest starting point.
Video is the format that consistently outperforms everything else, across almost every platform. Views per video on YouTube increased 76% in the past year with only a marginal increase in posting frequency. That is a quality-over-quantity finding. A small number of well-made videos, produced with care and with a clear sense of what they are trying to communicate, will outperform a high volume of functional but forgettable content. This is where audio-visual production connects directly to social strategy — not as an upsell, but as a practical reality. The content that performs is content that has been made properly.
The same logic applies to longer-form content. Podcasting has become one of the most effective tools for small organisations trying to build genuine authority in their field — not because podcasts generate large audiences quickly, but because they give an interested listener sustained, uninterrupted access to your thinking. For an organisation with real expertise and something specific to say, that kind of access is hard to replicate through any other format. We have written more about this in our perspective on why organisations should consider podcast production as part of a wider content approach.
AI is changing the picture in one important respect. Social platforms are increasingly being used as discovery engines alongside traditional search. According to Sprout Social’s research, 41% of Gen Z users now turn to social media first when looking for information online. At the same time, AI search tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews — are drawing discovery away from both traditional search and social feeds simultaneously. The organisations that will be found in this environment are the ones producing content that is specific, credible, and clearly structured.
For a small organisation, a workable social media strategy does not need to be complicated. It needs to answer a small number of questions clearly: what does social need to do for this organisation commercially, who specifically are we talking to, what do we have the credibility and the capacity to produce consistently, and how will we know if it is working. The answers to those questions determine everything else — which platforms are worth the effort, what content formats make sense, and what realistic success looks like.
What tends to go wrong is not that organisations lack the answers. It is that they start posting before the questions have been asked. A posting schedule built on an unclear foundation produces content that feels purposeless, because it is. The audience, increasingly selective about where it spends its attention, notices.
A social media strategy for a small organisation is not a large document or a complicated framework. It is a set of clear decisions made before anything is published, that give everything produced afterwards a reason to exist. That is, genuinely, all it needs to be.
