Two Audiences, One Feed: Posting for Both Customers
The standard advice for a business serving two very different customer groups is to split them into separate accounts, which is the fastest way to end up with one feed you maintain and one that quietly dies. The fix isn't separation at all — it's signposting who each post is for in the first six words, then letting everyone else scroll past without guilt.
Dave Smith
# Two Audiences, One Feed: Posting for Both Customers
There's a piece of advice handed out with enormous confidence to any business serving two distinct customer groups: split them up. One account for trade, one for the public. A separate page for weddings, another for everything else. Keep the wholesale side away from the retail lot.
It sounds tidy. It sounds professional. It's usually wrong.
Plenty of UK businesses live in this position. Builders' merchants selling to contractors on account and to a homeowner doing up a bathroom. Bakeries with a café out front and a wholesale round leaving at five in the morning. Photographers shooting weddings on Saturdays and corporate headshots on Tuesdays. Garden centres with a landscaping arm. Accountants juggling sole traders and limited companies who need completely different things. Two audiences, one business, and one very tired person trying to decide what to post.
Why the split feels like the right answer
The logic holds up on paper. Different customers care about different things. A contractor doesn't need your guide to choosing bathroom taps. A homeowner couldn't care less about pallet pricing or your account terms. Show the wrong thing to the wrong person and you bore them, and bored people unfollow.
So you separate. Clean lines, right audience, right message. And then the trouble starts.
What actually happens
You now have two accounts. Both need feeding. Both have roughly half the followers, which means half the engagement, which means both look like small quiet accounts to a platform deciding who to show things to. You've halved your reach and doubled your workload in one move.
In practice, almost nobody keeps both going. Within about six weeks there's one account being maintained and one drifting. The drifting one doesn't stay neutral either — it becomes a profile with your business name on it, last updated in March, quietly telling anyone who finds it that you might have packed it in.
Then there's the bit nobody mentions when they recommend the split: your two audiences are not strangers to each other. The contractor buying on account has a mother who wants her kitchen done. The couple booking a wedding both work somewhere that needs photography. The café regular runs the pub down the road that could take your bread. Separating your audiences removes precisely the crossover that makes local business work in the first place.
The real worry, and what to do with it
Strip it back and the fear isn't really about structure. It's "I'll bore half my followers."
Except a feed isn't a broadcast to everyone at once. Nobody sees all your posts — a single post reaches a slice of your audience, and the next one reaches a different slice. A trade-focused post doesn't get shown to every homeowner following you, and the reverse is equally true. The thing you're afraid of is far less total than it feels from the inside.
What matters is the ratio, not the separation. A rough starting point: post roughly in proportion to where the work comes from. If seventy per cent of your revenue is trade, let about seventy per cent of your posts lean that way. It isn't a rule, and you'll adjust it — but it beats agonising over every individual post.
Signpost in the first six words
This is the whole technique, and it takes no extra effort.
Make it obvious who each post is for, immediately. "Trade customers — the account portal changed this week." "Doing your own bathroom this autumn? Start here." "For anyone ordering for a wedding next summer..."
Everyone else scrolls past, and that is the correct outcome. Scrolling past something clearly not meant for you costs nothing and doesn't annoy anybody. What actually loses people is a post they can't place — three paragraphs about lead times before they work out whether it applies to them. Irrelevance is fine. Confusion isn't.
Hunt for the posts that do double duty
Some of your content serves both audiences at once, and those are worth spotting because they carry the most weight.
The van loaded up at six in the morning. The workshop mid-job. A supplier you've used for eleven years. A stock delivery landing. The team on a genuinely mental Saturday. Something that broke and how you sorted it. A new bit of kit.
None of this is aimed at anyone in particular, which is exactly why it works. It's evidence of a business that's busy, competent and staffed by actual humans — and that reads the same to a contractor as it does to someone browsing on their sofa. Lean on these when you can't face deciding whose turn it is.
When splitting genuinely is right
To be fair, sometimes it is. If the two sides trade under different names, splitting isn't optional. If the audiences would find each other actively off-putting rather than merely irrelevant, split. And if one side is big enough to justify its own dedicated person, give it its own account and let them run it properly.
The honest test is capacity: can you keep two accounts alive indefinitely, not just for the enthusiastic first fortnight? If the answer is no, it's one feed, and that's not a compromise — it's the right call.
That decision about who a post is for, and keeping the mix sensible across a month, is a lot of what Aunty Social handles quietly in the background. It learns how your business actually talks, then keeps the content types varied so one audience doesn't accidentally get every post for three weeks running.
One feed. Two audiences. Six words at the top telling people which one they are.