Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
TikTok pays creators from a rewards programme measured per 1,000 qualified views, and the rate depends on far more than view count. Here is the mechanism.
TikTok growth is decided in the first two seconds and confirmed by completion. Here is what the ranking system actually rewards and how to work with it.
Platform analytics stop at the platform. Tagged links tell you which post, which platform and which campaign actually sent someone to your site.
A giveaway that attracts the wrong audience costs more than it gains. Here are the rules to publish, the entry mechanics that work, and how to draw a defensible winner.
Instagram allows 2,200 characters in a caption and shows about 125 before the fold. Everything that matters has to be in that first line and a half.
Instagram fonts are Unicode substitutions, not fonts. They work in bios and captions, and they are unreadable to screen readers. Here is how to use them anyway.
Some numbers go up reliably and mean nothing. Here is which creator metrics are vanity metrics, which are real, and what to track instead.
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.