Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
Engagement rate by reach and by followers measure different things and can differ by several times. Here is which to use, when, and how to label it.
YouTube engagement rate is easy to calculate and less useful than three other numbers. Here is the formula, the bands, and what to track instead.
Reference numbers for creators across platforms - engagement bands by size, posting cadence, and content length - with the method and the caveats stated.
Instagram gives you 150 characters. Here is a template that uses them, examples by account type, and the mistakes that waste the only line strangers read.
Instagram Story size is 1080x1920, but the top and bottom bands belong to the interface. Here is the usable area and how to design a template once.
An Instagram Reels cover is shown at 9:16 in the Reel and cropped square in your grid. One image has to survive both. Here is how to position it.
Instagram carousel size is 1080x1350 per slide, and every slide must share the first one's ratio. Here is how to split one wide image so the seams disappear.
Instagram growth comes down to three things: being shown to non-followers, earning the save or share, and a profile that converts a visit into a follow.
The honest answer to how long 1,000 subscribers takes is arithmetic on your own growth rate - not an anecdote from someone who got lucky.
Shorts pay from a shared pool at a 45% creator share, not from watch-page ads at 55%. That structural difference explains everything about Shorts income.
A banned hashtag can quietly suppress a post, and no platform tells you. Here is how to test a tag before you use it, in order of likelihood.
LinkedIn has no documented hashtag limit, but three is where the convention settled. Here is why more looks amateur and what they actually do.