Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
TikTok publishes two documents. One says what gets removed; the other says what is allowed to stay and will not be recommended, and the second one is longer.
Instagram publishes two separate rulebooks. One decides whether a post stays up; the other decides whether anyone who does not follow you ever sees it, and it never sends a notification.
The "1-2%" target repeated across the web has no source. Two things about a keyword are checkable - whether it is present and where it first appears - and they are what to measure.
Most of what gets called clickbait is taste. A narrow slice of it is covered by published policy, and confusing the two is why the advice on this subject is so bad.
Power words are a copywriting convention, not a ranking factor. What is measurable is position: a first line built entirely from function words has spent its one chance on nothing.
Instagram writes an automatic description for every image whether you do or not. Yours replaces it, you get 100 characters, and the field is three taps deep.
Instagram stores 100 characters, LinkedIn 120, X 1,000, Bluesky 2,000. A description written for one and pasted into another is cut mid-sentence, and nothing tells you.
Between 105 and 180 words, and the range is not vagueness - it is the difference between a Reels voiceover and a live presentation. Pick the pace and the number is exact.
A shot list has six columns and one job: make sure nothing is discovered on shoot day. Here is the template, what each column is for, and the two columns people add that make it worse.
A prompter app wraps text on width, which means a line can end on "the". Where the breaks go is the whole format, and it is the one thing the app cannot decide for you.
Filler is usually treated as a style problem. On a video with a fixed runtime it is an arithmetic problem, and the number worth reading is seconds rather than words.
Every opening line belongs to one of about six shapes, and each shape obliges the rest of the video differently. Pick the shape first; the wording is the easy half.