Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
YouTube's chapter rules are a parser, not guidance. Break one of the four and you get no chapters at all — not the valid ones, none of them — with no error anywhere on the page.
Most hashtag mistakes cost you one tag. Three of them cost you every tag on the post, and none of the three announce themselves.
The same link renders two different cards. Facebook gives a title 88 characters on desktop and about 65 on a phone — and the phone is where most of the taps are.
A shortened link tells you nothing about its destination. Here is how to expand a short URL safely, read the redirect chain, and spot the hop that breaks tracking.
Facebook caches what it read the first time. Here is why a fixed page still shows the old image, and the ways to force a re-scrape.
Rich Pins fail for a short list of reasons, nearly all of them markup on your own page. Here is the order to check them in.
A link preview not showing is almost always one of six things. Here they are in order of likelihood, each with the check that confirms it.
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.