One video, five platforms: adapting a post without starting over

Start from the long version

A long YouTube video gives you the most material to work with: the thumbnail, the title, the description, chapters and a transcript. The chapters show you where the strongest moments are, and the transcript gives you text to quote. Pick one to three moments that work on their own without the rest of the video.

Change the frame first

The first thing that changes is the shape. YouTube uses 16:9; Shorts, Reels and TikTok use a 9:16 vertical frame, and YouTube treats square or vertical uploads of up to three minutes as Shorts. Re-frame clips around the subject instead of letting an app crop the middle out of a wide shot, and remake the cover at 1080×1920 with its text in the centre. A landscape picture can sit on a blurred background when it can't be cropped.

Then rewrite the text for each limit

The same caption won't fit everywhere. X gives free accounts 280 characters and counts links as 23 and emoji as 2. Bluesky allows 300, Threads 500, Instagram 2,200, TikTok's app 4,000, and LinkedIn 3,000. Hashtag rules differ too: at most 5 on Instagram, and more than 60 on YouTube means none count.

• X and Bluesky: one sharp sentence plus the link.
• Instagram and TikTok: hook line first, a few short lines, at most a handful of specific hashtags.
• YouTube description: summary, chapters, links, then hashtags.

A simple order of work

Do the steps in the same order each time so nothing is forgotten: pick the moments, re-frame and export the clips, make one vertical cover, write the long caption once, then cut it down for each shorter limit. Check each version on a phone before posting, because overlays and cut-offs only show there.