How the Platforms Differ

You do not need to be on every platform. You need to be where your readers already scroll, posting in the shape that platform rewards. A volunteer with four hours a week who posts well on two platforms will reach more people than one who posts badly on nine.

So start with who is there. Pew Research Center's 2025 survey asked U.S. adults where they regularly get news. Facebook came first at 38 percent, then YouTube at 35, Instagram and TikTok at 20 each, X at 12, Reddit at 9, and Threads and Bluesky in the low single digits. LinkedIn was not in that survey. Those are national numbers. Your town may skew older (Facebook) or younger (Instagram, TikTok), and the people who show up at a library board meeting are probably not the people dancing on TikTok. Ask a few readers where they saw your last piece. That beats any survey.

Platform by platform

Facebook

The biggest local audience in most small towns, and the home of community groups, which is where a lot of local argument actually happens. Photos and native video do well. Links are the sore spot. Facebook has long been accused of showing link posts to fewer people, and in December 2025 Meta confirmed a test that limits some Pages and professional-mode profiles to two link posts unless they pay for Meta Verified. (Some coverage describes this as two per month; TechCrunch's report does not give a time period.) Links in comments were not limited in that test, and publishers were excluded. As of October 2026 the reporting we found still calls it a test. Check whether your account sees a link limit before you plan around one.

X

Smaller than it was, but still where many reporters, officials and political staff read. Short text, images and replies. A link counts as 23 characters however long it is. In October 2025 X's head of product said link posts got lower reach and that X was testing an in-app browser to fix that. Elon Musk replied that a link with almost no description would get weak distribution. Translation: write a real post and put the link under it.

Instagram

Pictures, carousels and Reels. Links in captions are not tappable. Readers reach your article through the link in your profile bio (up to five links, according to third-party guides), a link sticker in Stories, or by searching for you. So an Instagram post has to carry the whole point by itself. Instagram cut hashtags to five per post in a gradual rollout announced in December 2025.

Threads

Meta's text platform, tied to Instagram accounts. Posts are 500 characters, and since September 2025 you can attach a text block of up to 10,000 characters. Links work in the post body, and Meta's Threads developer docs cap a post at five links. Conversational tone does better than announcements.

Bluesky

Smaller, with a lot of journalists, academics and people who left X. Posts are 300 characters. Links make a link card and the culture there is friendly to them, which makes Bluesky one of the better places to post a straight link to an article. Alt text on images is common and expected.

LinkedIn

Professional audience: nonprofit staff, local business owners, agency people. Longer text posts and document carousels do well. Several outside studies found posts with links get less reach, though the size of the penalty varies a lot between studies and seems heavier for company pages than personal profiles. Treat any single percentage you read with suspicion.

Substack Notes

The short-post feed inside Substack. If you publish on Substack, your subscribers and other writers see Notes, and restacks can carry your work to new readers. A Note can hold one kind of attachment: images (up to six), a link, or a video. Links to your own posts are normal here.

TikTok

Vertical video, discovery driven. People mostly find you through the For You feed. Following matters less here than anywhere else. Links in captions are not clickable for most accounts, so the video itself carries the point. Third-party guides say the caption limit rose from 2,200 to 4,000 characters in 2024 (some still list 2,200, and TikTok's help center gives no number we could find). Either way, almost nobody reads past the first line.

YouTube

The second biggest news source in the Pew survey and the search engine people use when they want to understand something. Long video for explainers and full meeting segments. Shorts (up to three minutes, square or vertical) for clips. Links in the description work. YouTube is also where your video lives longest; a good explainer can draw views for years.

The numbers, as of October 2026

These change. Instagram cut its hashtag cap, TikTok raised its caption limit, Facebook started testing link limits, and Bluesky tripled its video length, all within about two years. Check again before you build a template around any of them.

Where each number comes from: X's 280-character limit and 23-character links, Threads' 500 and 10,000 characters and 5 links, Bluesky's 300 characters and 4 images of up to 2 MB, Instagram's 5 hashtags, and YouTube's title, description and thumbnail rules come from the platforms' own help pages, developer documentation or announcements. Everything else in the table is from third-party guides (Socialync, Sprout Social, Buffer and others listed in the sources): the Facebook, Instagram caption, LinkedIn, X Premium, TikTok and Substack Notes text limits, and the feed image sizes. Treat those as reported, not official.

How to choose

Pick one platform where your readers already are (for most local writers, that is Facebook). Pick one where people who can amplify you are (reporters and officials: X, Bluesky, Threads or LinkedIn, depending on your area). If you make video anyway, add one video platform. Stop there for six months. You can always add a platform. Abandoned accounts with a last post from 2023 look worse than no account.