Editing built for the platform

Cross-posting is the most common reason a content program plateaus. A Reel exported with a caption block sitting in the bottom two hundred pixels reads fine in your editor and is covered by the interface on TikTok. A YouTube Short cut to a TikTok pace often loses the audience because Shorts viewers arrive with a different tolerance for setup. A LinkedIn video that opens with a sound-dependent hook dies silently, because a large share of that feed autoplays muted and never gets unmuted.

Each platform page in this hub documents the mechanics that actually govern distribution on that surface, the anatomy of an edit that fits it, and the technical delivery spec we export against. The goal is that you can hand the page to any editor, internal or external, and get output that matches the destination instead of output that matches a template.

Short-form covers TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. All three are 9:16 at 1080 by 1920, and all three punish a slow open, but the hook windows and the caption conventions differ, and the safe zones are not identical. Get those three right and the same source recording feeds all three surfaces without the copy-paste look that audiences have learned to scroll past.

Long-form covers YouTube episodes, brand films, explainers, courses, webinars, and VSLs. Here the constraints flip: retention is won in the first thirty seconds and then defended by structure, chapters, pacing changes, and visual variety across ten to forty minutes. Between the two sit the repurposing formats, podcast clips, webinar cutdowns, event recaps, testimonials, and UGC ads, which each have their own selection logic. Picking the wrong clip is a bigger failure than editing it imperfectly.

Loudness is the clearest example. Most social platforms normalize toward roughly minus fourteen LUFS integrated with a true peak around minus one dBTP. Deliver something mastered at minus nine and the platform turns it down, which flattens your dynamics and makes your video feel quieter than the one before it in the feed. Deliver at minus twenty-four and viewers reach for the volume control, which is a scroll risk.

The same applies to safe zones, caption placement, cover frames, thumbnail dimensions, bitrate, and codec choice. Every platform page lists the values we export against and flags where a spec varies or where the platform has changed guidance. If a number is uncertain we say so rather than inventing precision.

The economics of a video program work when a single capture session feeds multiple surfaces. A two-hour podcast recording can reasonably produce one full YouTube episode, eight to twelve short-form clips across three platforms, two or three LinkedIn native cuts with different framing, an audio-first version, and a set of quote cards. That only works if the recording is set up for it, which means framing with room to reframe, clean isolated audio tracks, and a shot list that anticipates the vertical crop.

Read the platform pages for the surfaces you actually publish on, then use the reframing and safe-zone guides to make sure the capture supports them. If you are deciding how much to produce, the content volume planner turns a target output into a recording schedule.

Two platforms done properly beats five done adequately, and the correct two are decided by where your buyers already are, not by which surface is growing fastest in general. A B2B software company whose buyers live on LinkedIn gains very little from a strong TikTok presence, however good the content is. A consumer product with a visually demonstrable benefit is in the opposite position.

The practical test is whether you can name the specific person you want to reach and say honestly which app they open when they are bored and which they open when they are working. Publish where those two answers point, then treat every other surface as free secondary distribution for content that already exists rather than as its own production line.

Platform specs and distribution behaviour move, sometimes quietly. Caption safe zones shift when an interface adds a new button row. Recommended aspect ratios get deprecated. A surface that rewarded three-second hooks starts rewarding slightly longer setups as its audience matures. The cost of not tracking this is invisible: your content does not break, it just quietly reaches fewer people.

We revise these pages when a documented spec changes or when our own delivery data contradicts what is published, and we mark values as observed rather than official where a platform has never confirmed them. If you spot a number that has gone stale, tell us and we will check it.