Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
Price on reach times a niche rate times your engagement band — never on followers alone. Quote three numbers: the ask, the fair rate, and the floor you walk away below.
A universal link opens the app when it is installed and the website when it is not. A scheme URI opens the app or does nothing at all — silently.
Some of these identify a person, not a campaign. igshid names the account that shared, mc_eid names the subscriber — and YouTube's t must never be stripped.
Mid-rolls need eight minutes. Everything after that is editorial: put breaks on cuts you already made, keep them out of the opening, and leave the end screen alone.
Apple's public directory hands out a 600-pixel copy. The 3000×3000 the publisher submitted is at the same address with one number changed.
Leave the preheader empty and every inbox fills it from the first text in your email — usually a link nobody clicks. It is the cheapest fix in email marketing.
Alt text is read by people, not just crawlers. Where each platform hides the field, what a good description does, and why reused images lose theirs.
Bluesky is the one platform that will simply tell you what is on a post. You get every image, the alt text, and the file exactly as it was uploaded.
Threads answers a signed-out request honestly, which makes it one of the easier platforms to get a picture out of. Two details are worth knowing first.
Two different links, two different routes. A post gives you what its link card publishes; a Page gives you its picture at the size Facebook stores.
Instagram publishes a larger copy of every public post's picture so link cards can render it. Here is how to reach it, and why the link stops working.
X keeps one file per photo and serves it at six named sizes. The timeline shows you a middling one; the largest is a single word away in the URL.