Fewer than you fear, and for a different reason than you think. The baseline set for most owner-run businesses is a Facebook page, an Instagram account if your work is visual, a LinkedIn company page, and your Google profile, which is its own checklist item. But the real answer hides in what these profiles are for at the baseline stage. Before any of them is a marketing channel, each one is a public record that your business exists, run by the platforms everyone, humans and machines alike, uses to check.
Get that frame right and the workload shrinks. A baseline profile has one job: Be accurate, be consistent with everything else that carries your name, and link back to your website. Posting is a separate decision you can make later, or never.
Profiles as corroboration
A customer who hears about you checks somewhere before calling, and where they check depends on who they are. Retail and food get checked on Instagram and Facebook. Trades get checked on Facebook and Google. Anyone selling to businesses gets checked on LinkedIn, where the absence of a company page reads the way an unlisted phone number used to.
Machines run the same check with higher stakes. Search engines and AI assistants decide how confidently to talk about your business by cross-referencing the places your name, address form, and web address appear. Every consistent profile is a witness vouching for your identity. Every mismatch, an old address on Facebook, a different phone on a directory, splits their confidence, and a hedging machine simply mentions you less. Your website should also point at the profiles from its own code, closing the loop in both directions, which is a one-time task for whoever maintains your site.
On our own site, four anchors do that vouching: the LinkedIn company page, Instagram, Facebook, and our Chamber of Commerce listing. That last one is worth noticing. A membership directory is a profile too, and in some ways the strongest witness on the list, because a third party maintains it. If you belong to a chamber or a trade association, their listing of you is corroboration you already paid for. Make sure it carries the same name, number, and web address as everything else.
One lesson from wiring ours: Check every profile link in a real browser before you publish it anywhere. Platforms actively mislead automated checkers, each in its own way — one returns an error code to any non-browser visitor by design, another's firewall rejects tools that look like bots even when the page is fine. A link that "tests broken" may be perfectly healthy, and a tool that says so is not lying to you so much as being lied to. Eyes on the actual page settles it in seconds.
The profile picture you forgot you have
There is one more surface in this family, and almost nobody thinks of it as a profile: the preview card that appears when someone pastes your link into a text, a group chat, or a post. That card, image, title, and description, is your business's face in every conversation you are not part of. It comes from a few lines of code on your site, and platforms build the preview from it automatically.
Two things we learned shipping ours. First, one card serves almost everywhere — Facebook and LinkedIn both read the same tags, so you do not need per-platform versions of anything. Instagram is the exception, consuming no link previews at all, which is why anything meant for that channel needs its own image sized for it, made when you need it. Second, the only way to know your card looks right is to send yourself the link and look. Ours shipped with a visual glitch that every automated check passed cleanly, because the checks confirm the card exists, and only a human can see that it is ugly.
The judgment calls
Claim more than you commit to. Claiming a profile costs minutes and parks your name so nobody else can take it. Committing to post is a real ongoing cost. Claim the full baseline set now; commit to the one platform your customers actually check, later, on purpose. An accurate, quiet profile is a fine thing to own. What hurts is the half-abandoned one, last post two years ago, old hours, wrong number, actively testifying that nobody is minding the store. If a profile can't be kept accurate, keep it minimal instead.
Scheduling is already free. When you do start posting, the platforms schedule natively at no cost — Meta's business tools cover Facebook and Instagram together, and LinkedIn schedules its own. A paid scheduling tool re-sells a capability you already own, and at baseline stage the money is better spent on nearly anything else.
Match the platform to the customer, and stop. A dental practice needs Facebook and Google far more than LinkedIn. The B2B bookkeeper reverses that. A landscaper's Instagram is a portfolio that works while he sleeps; a law office's Instagram is a chore with no audience. Two platforms served well beat five served thinly, and nothing on this checklist requires you to be everywhere.
What profiles will not do
A baseline profile catches people who are already checking on you, and it vouches for you to the machines doing the same. It does not generate demand, and treating profile upkeep as marketing is how owners end up spending Sunday nights on captions nobody asked for. The baseline is infrastructure. It should be boring, consistent, and done.
What you actually say on these platforms, in each one's format and character limits, with the same positioning everywhere, is its own piece of work, and it comes next on the list. Get the record straight first. It is remarkable how much of being found comes down to every witness telling the same story.