When you’re creating social media content, it’s important to have a plan of how to adapt content to each social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Once you’ve established which platform is best for your business and the type of content you can produce within your business’s resources, content needs to be adapted to each platform as they each have preferable formats. While it is tempting to publish the same photo and caption across all platforms to save time, this minimises a post’s optimisation. Let’s run through the different factors that should be altered according to the social media platform they are on.

Adapting content can take significant time and resources. For small businesses that can impact on their ability to operate efficiently. That’s why you may want to consider the benefits of working with Green Socials because we offer social media management for eco-friendly brands Australia. Our social media packages offer a convenient way to boost your social media following, reach and engagement while you focus on your core business strategy.

How to adapt social media content for different platforms

Below are 5 hot tips for how to adapt your social media content for different platforms. These tips aim to help you optimise your content, save resources, and create content that sells and converts.

How you choose to adapt your social media content for the different platforms, will also be informed by your overarching digital marketing strategy and content strategy.

Adapt your social media captions

Captions should be created with intention and consider the audience that you are reaching. As we already discussed in hich social media platform is best for your business niche?

Different platforms will convey different messages and so the language should be a reflection of that.

While Instagram and Facebook tend to be more social and fun, Twitter and LinkedIn are more professional and informative. YouTube captions are simply a description of the video. The word limit of each platform varies with captions capped at 220 characters for Instagram, 100 characters for TikTok, 280 characters for Twitter.

Facebook and LinkedIn both have substantial character limits but the recommended length is 50 characters for a Facebook post, 100 characters for a LinkedIn status and 3000 words for LinkedIn articles where the ‘See More’ button cuts off messages at 100 characters.

Having a call to action (CTA) related to driving your customers to your website or buying products also differ across each platform, with Instagram commonly using ‘link in bio’ alongside other CTA options (product tags in photos on tile posts and many options for stories).

With Facebook, you would usually say ‘link below’ and you can also tag products. TikTok uses a link in the bio feature while Twitter and LinkedIn can directly link a URL but are generally not geared towards shoppable features.

2. Adapt your social media image dimensions

Image dimensions vary across all platforms. Instagram requires image cropping as it is a square, compared to the other social media platforms which use a rectangle format for their images. More specifically these are the dimensions for each platform.

Facebook Image Size – 1200 x 628 pixels
Instagram Tile Post Size – 1080 x 1080 pixels
Instagram Story Size - 1080 x 1920 pixels
Twitter Image Size – 900 x 450 pixels
LinkedIn Size – 1350 x 440 pixels

The same images can be used across all platforms but adjusted according to the dimensions. Of course, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t necessarily require images to be considered high-quality content, but Instagram and Facebook definitely do.

3. Adapt your social media video content

Videos have a significant potential of capturing a viewers attention when done correctly. TikTok and YouTube are video-centric platforms specifically designed for video optimisation.

TikTok uses a 1080×1920 resolution and can be anywhere between 5 and 60 seconds long, but videos that are 9 to 15 seconds perform the best.

YouTube has a broad range of specifications so it’s pretty easy to upload any kind of video. Instagram tile post videos can only be 60 seconds long, stories can only be 15 seconds, reels can be up to 30 seconds long and live stream can be up to 60 minutes long.

All platforms use the MP4 format, with YouTube and LinkedIn accepting a much wider range of formats.

4. Adapt your social media hashtags

Did you know hashtags were first used on Twitter? Hashtags are a powerful way to increase your brand awareness and make it easier for people interested in your products or services to find you.

When someone searches for a particular keyword or hashtag, hashtags draws attention to your post. Keeping hashtags short and simple rather than using a lot of words in one is the most effective way to use hashtags across all platforms.

Choose a hashtag that is known because if you choose a hashtag that no one is searching for this completely defeats the purpose of using a hashtag. Be specific, as broad hashtags will be lost among the thousands of posts.

It is recommended to only use one or two hashtags on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and make it so that it reads a part of the text. YouTube likes 3-5 hashtags, again useful for people trying to find your videos while allowing you to categorise your content. They can be added either into the title or description of the video, keeping the maximum to 2 and 3 respectively. Instagram on the other hand, is hashtag central, with the capacity of 30 hashtags to be added into a caption or following comment.

Keep in mind the algorithm constantly changes, and it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what the optimal hashtag number is, but if you’ve got 30 niche hashtags then this will only maximise the potential of your business to be found.

5. Prioritise optimisation for each social platform

While each platform does have their own specifications, you can still merge multiple social media platforms at once and optimise each post when publishing them or scheduling them.

The obvious no brainer is Facebook and Instagram as they are from the same META group. Linking both the Instagram and Facebook allows you to simultaneously publish on both platforms, making it much easier for the content creator.

A hot tip would just be to check the caption and change the discrete wording surrounding ‘link in bio’ or ‘link below’ to ensure it reads well. Following on from the popularity of TikTok videos, Instagram launched their own version of reel short videos, giving you the chance to redistribute your video on two platform streams. Just make sure, if you go from Tiktok to Instagram, that you get rid of the water mark.

Follow this link for a guide on the different ways to do that. Content shared on Twitter and LinkedIn can also be mimicked as long as the Twitter status keeps within the word limit.

Final thoughts on how to adapt content for different social media platforms

When you’re creating content for social media, it’s important to know how to customise and adapt content for different social media platforms. That includes adapting your captions, image dimensions, video size, hashtags and optimising publishing.

While adapting content is best practice, it does require significant time, effort and expertise to achieve. Having a social media content strategy is therefore critical. At Green Socials we offer social media management for small businesses Australia (and further abroad). Connect with us to find out more about our social media packages and how we can help your eco-friendly business to thrive and grow.