Decide Which Channels To Stop

Effort spread thin across six platforms produces six weak presences, because every feed rewards concentration and ignores a trickle. Nobody prunes, partly because closing an account feels like discarding an asset and partly because the metric everyone checks - follower count - never goes down and therefore never signals a problem. The decision needs a measure of current return per hour, and it has to distinguish a channel that failed from one that was never actually run.

The skill file

---
name: channel-portfolio-pruning
description: Use when you are maintaining accounts on five or six platforms, most of them barely, and cannot say which ones deserve the time.
---

# Decide Which Channels To Stop

Effort spread thin across six platforms produces six weak presences, because every feed rewards concentration and ignores a trickle. Nobody prunes, partly because closing an account feels like discarding an asset and partly because the metric everyone checks - follower count - never goes down and therefore never signals a problem. The decision needs a measure of current return per hour, and it has to distinguish a channel that failed from one that was never actually run.

## What you need first

- median reach and engagement per post per channel over the last six months, medians not means
- an honest estimate of hours per week each channel takes including replies and moderation
- what each channel has produced in real terms: enquiries, subscribers, links, hires, or nothing you can name

## Method

1. Put median reach per post and hours per week for each channel into one table. Leave follower count out of the decision entirely - it records a past that may have no bearing on who sees anything now.
2. Attribute outcomes as far back as you honestly can, and write unknown where you cannot rather than defaulting to zero or to a flattering guess.
3. Separate underperforming from under-invested. A platform you post to twice a month has never been tested, and cutting it tells you nothing about the platform.
4. Pick at most two channels to run properly. Everything else moves to one of three states: parked with a pinned post pointing elsewhere, kept as a claimed handle with no posting, or deleted.
5. Before deleting anything, weigh what the profile does for your identity footprint - profiles are used to confirm who a company is, and a dormant but complete profile is usually worth more than a removed one. Practitioners disagree here, so decide it per handle rather than as a rule.
6. Name in writing where the freed hours go. A prune that does not reassign the time becomes less work rather than better work, and quietly reverses within a quarter.
7. Set a revisit date six months out with a pre-agreed condition for restarting a parked channel, so the decision can be reversed on evidence instead of on someone's enthusiasm.

## What this produces

A channel table with median reach, hours and named outcomes, and a keep, park or delete decision per channel with a revisit date.

## Where this goes wrong

- keeping a channel because the follower number is large, when median reach shows almost none of them see anything
- deleting rather than parking, which gives up a claimed handle and a profile that helps confirm your identity elsewhere
- cutting a channel you never genuinely ran, then concluding the platform does not work for your market

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/channel-portfolio-pruning

What you need first

• median reach and engagement per post per channel over the last six months, medians not means
• an honest estimate of hours per week each channel takes including replies and moderation
• what each channel has produced in real terms: enquiries, subscribers, links, hires, or nothing you can name

Method

1. 01 Put median reach per post and hours per week for each channel into one table. Leave follower count out of the decision entirely - it records a past that may have no bearing on who sees anything now.
2. 02 Attribute outcomes as far back as you honestly can, and write unknown where you cannot rather than defaulting to zero or to a flattering guess.
3. 03 Separate underperforming from under-invested. A platform you post to twice a month has never been tested, and cutting it tells you nothing about the platform.
4. 04 Pick at most two channels to run properly. Everything else moves to one of three states: parked with a pinned post pointing elsewhere, kept as a claimed handle with no posting, or deleted.
5. 05 Before deleting anything, weigh what the profile does for your identity footprint - profiles are used to confirm who a company is, and a dormant but complete profile is usually worth more than a removed one. Practitioners disagree here, so decide it per handle rather than as a rule.
6. 06 Name in writing where the freed hours go. A prune that does not reassign the time becomes less work rather than better work, and quietly reverses within a quarter.
7. 07 Set a revisit date six months out with a pre-agreed condition for restarting a parked channel, so the decision can be reversed on evidence instead of on someone's enthusiasm.

What this produces

A channel table with median reach, hours and named outcomes, and a keep, park or delete decision per channel with a revisit date.

Where this goes wrong

• keeping a channel because the follower number is large, when median reach shows almost none of them see anything
• deleting rather than parking, which gives up a claimed handle and a profile that helps confirm your identity elsewhere
• cutting a channel you never genuinely ran, then concluding the platform does not work for your market

Use this skill in your own AI

The download is a plain markdown file with the name and trigger in its frontmatter. Where an assistant supports skills it can load itself, that frontmatter is what it reads to decide this one applies.

Questions about this skill

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