Set up your accounts properly

A profile is the landing page for every post you will ever publish. Someone sees one post, likes it, taps your name, and decides in a few seconds whether to follow, click, or leave. Most founders spend hours on posts and minutes on the profile those posts send people to. This chapter reverses that for one afternoon.

It also covers what each network says it rewards. The word "says" matters: the sources here are the networks’ own published explanations of their ranking, and where a network has not published one, this chapter says so rather than repeating folklore.

The profile checklist, for every network

• The name field contains the thing people would search for. On a personal account that is your name plus what you do; on a brand account it is the brand plus the category. "Mara Lind · invoicing for freelancers" does more work than "Mara Lind".
• The first line of the bio says who it is for and what they get. Not a mission statement. "Templates that get freelancers paid faster" is a bio; "Empowering creators worldwide" is a poster.
• One link, and it is the link you decided on in chapter 1. If the network gives you several link slots, still lead with that one.
• The photo is the same across every network, and it is a face if you are the brand. Recognisability across networks is what makes cross-posting compound instead of scatter.
• A pinned or featured post exists, and it is the single best explanation of what you sell — ideally one that already did well.
• The account is the right type. Some networks need a professional or business account before you can schedule or publish through any tool; details per network below.

What each network says it rewards

The following is drawn from each network’s own explanations, linked in the sources. Where a network publishes nothing, the honest advice is to test rather than to guess.

Instagram

Instagram publishes a per-surface explanation of its ranking. In its own account, Feed weighs your activity and your history with the poster alongside the post’s popularity; Reels leans on watching and sharing behaviour and on the content itself (audio, visuals); Explore leans on popularity signals across the wider audience. The practical read: a Reel and a Feed post are ranked on different things, so a format that works in one is not automatically a format for the other.

Setup note: publishing to Instagram through any third-party tool, seenpaid included, requires an Instagram professional account (Business or Creator), and Meta caps API-published posts at 100 per rolling 24 hours per account. Switch the account type in Instagram’s settings before you connect it anywhere.

Facebook

Meta’s help centre describes Feed ranking as personalised: what you see is ordered by predictions of what you are likely to engage with, based on your past behaviour, who posted it, and the type of content. For a Page, that means reach depends heavily on whether people who see a post interact with it; a Page that only broadcasts links tends to give the ranking system little to work with. Treat that as a hypothesis to test on your Page, not a law.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s help centre describes feed relevance as three groups of signals: identity (your profile — location, workplace, skills), content (engagement, topic, recency, conversation quality) and activity (what you have reacted to, commented on and shared). Two practical readings: your profile details are listed as an input, so the headline and about section are worth the same care as a post; and since engagement and conversation are listed too, replying to every comment is cheap and plausibly helps. How much each signal weighs is not published — that part is yours to test.

TikTok

TikTok’s newsroom explanation of the For You feed lists user interactions (finishing a video, liking, sharing, following), video information (captions, sounds, hashtags) and, weighted lower, device and account settings. It also states plainly that follower count and a previous viral video are not direct factors. That is the single most useful sentence in this chapter for anyone starting from zero: on TikTok, an account with no followers is not penalised for having none.

Setup note: seenpaid publishes to TikTok through the upload-to-inbox flow, which means the video lands in your TikTok drafts and you add the caption and press publish in the app. That is a limitation to know before you plan a TikTok schedule around any third-party tool.

X

X published the source code of its recommendation system in 2023. The repository describes services that assemble the For You timeline from candidate posts (people you follow and people you do not) and rank them with engagement-prediction models. What it does not give you is a rulebook, and the code has changed since. Anything you read about "links being punished" or "the algorithm rewarding X Premium" should be treated as a claim to test on your account, not a fact — this guide has not found an official statement either way and will not invent one.

Bluesky

Bluesky is the outlier: there is no single algorithm to please. Its 2023 announcement describes algorithmic choice — a default feed plus custom feeds that anyone can build and users can subscribe to. For a founder, that means one growth lever is being picked up by the topic feeds your buyer subscribes to — and since each feed sets its own rules, often by topic or keyword, writing in the plain words your buyer would use is a reasonable thing to test. Posts are capped at 300 characters (graphemes, in the protocol’s own schema), and links in posts published through the API need to be marked up explicitly (facets) or they arrive as plain text; seenpaid does this for you.

Pinterest

Pinterest publishes creative specs for Pins: a vertical 2:3 aspect ratio (1000×1500 pixels), a title of up to 100 characters of which the first 40 are the most likely to be shown, and a description of up to 500. Pinterest describes itself as a place people go to discover ideas and products, and the title and description are the text a Pin carries; treat them the way you would a hook elsewhere, and test plain, descriptive wording against clever wording.

Threads, Mastodon and the rest

Threads has not published a ranking explanation comparable to Instagram’s; the sensible assumption is that it shares Meta’s general approach, and the sensible action is to test. Mastodon’s home timeline has no ranking algorithm — it is chronological, and discovery runs through hashtags, the local timeline of your instance, and boosts. Pick an instance whose local timeline is your buyer’s community, and use hashtags as the discovery mechanism they actually are there.

One account or several?

Founders ask this constantly and the answer depends on one question: who will people want to hear from — you, or the thing you made?

Warming up a cold account: what is known and what is not

You will read that new accounts should "warm up" — follow, like and comment for a week before posting. Nothing in any network’s published documentation confirms that a waiting period helps a new account; nothing rules it out either. What the documentation does support, on every network that publishes ranking signals, is that the system learns who a post is for from who interacts with it. So the useful version of warm-up is not a waiting period. It is spending week one commenting substantively on posts your buyer reads, so that the first people who see your posts are the right ones.

The 30-minute audit before you move on

1. Open each profile in a private browser window, on a phone. Read only the first line of the bio. Would the buyer from chapter 1 know this is for them?
2. Tap the link. Count the seconds until the offer is visible.
3. Look at the last nine posts as a grid or a list. Do they look like they came from one place?
4. Check the account type on Instagram and any network that distinguishes personal from professional.
5. Confirm that one post is pinned and that it is the best explanation of the product you have.

If any of those fails, fix it now. Every post you publish from here on inherits the profile it points to.