Every post format, every platform — and what a video pipeline covers

Post-type support per platform as of August 2026 — platform formats checked against the platforms' own help pages, scheduling support against what VidVertex posts through Zernio and Metricool at that date.

Platforms multiplied their formats until "post" stopped meaning anything specific. The format you choose decides lifespan, discovery and what the content can do — so here's the map, platform by platform, then the strategic view.

The format families

Feed video (the short) — TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels, Snapchat Spotlight. Vertical, permanent, recommended to strangers — the only family with built-in cold reach, which is why it's the center of every growth strategy (how the recommendation works).

Stories — Instagram/Facebook Stories, Snapchat Stories, TikTok Stories. Ephemeral (typically 24 h), shown mostly to existing followers. No cold reach to speak of — stories are a retention surface: behind-the-scenes, polls, reminders, shoutout inventory. Strategically: stories deepen an audience; they don't build one.

Carousels / photo posts — Instagram carousels (the classic), TikTok photo posts, Pinterest pins/boards, X/Threads/Bluesky image posts. Swipeable sequences shine for lists, steps and storytelling-in-frames; platforms currently treat photo posts kindly (they hold viewers per-slide, which the metrics like). Aspect expectations differ — Instagram favors 4:5 for feed carousels while TikTok photo posts stay 9:16 — worth knowing before designing one set of slides for both.

Text posts — X, Threads, Bluesky natively; Facebook still supports them honestly. The zero-production format: an opinion, an insight, a hook-as-post. For video operators, text platforms are where the words you already wrote (hooks, scripts, captions) get a second life (repurposing logic).

Long-form & live — YouTube long-form, lives everywhere. Different economy (watch time, parasocial depth), outside this guide's scope except as the source material short-form gets cut from.

Community/side surfaces — YouTube community posts, pinned comments, notes-style features: small, follower-facing, free — use them as the caption's big brother, not as a strategy.

The strategic reading

1. Shorts build, stories bind, carousels explain, text distills. Cold reach comes from feed video (and increasingly photo-post carousels); everything else works the audience you already have.
2. One production, several formats. A single strong idea can ship as a short (the demonstration), a carousel (the steps), and a text post (the claim) — three surfaces, one thought. That's format repurposing, the sibling of platform repurposing.
3. Match format to job: launching or growing → shorts volume; monetizing an audience → stories and text join in (funnel playbook); explaining or listing → carousel.

Platform × post type — the hub table

Which platform takes which post type, and where each one gets its own guide. "Through VidVertex" means the type goes through the same stack, texts, scheduling and upload history as a video post; a dash means the platform either doesn't have the format or can't take it through the scheduling route, and the plan names the skip before the run.

Reading the columns:

• Video is a 9:16 render per brand × platform — the format with cold reach everywhere.
• Text post is the words, optionally with images — X and Bluesky take up to 4, Threads and Facebook up to 10. Only the four text-native platforms have the format.
• Carousel is an ordered image list. Instagram likes 4:5 slides, TikTok photo posts stay 9:16, so design for the platform you care about most or keep slides 4:5-safe. Pinterest is one media item per pin through the scheduling route, so it's never in the carousel column.
• Story is one image or video posted as-is, no caption, no first comment — Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat.

What VidVertex covers

VidVertex is built around the feed video family — the one with cold reach: 9:16 video posts produced per brand × platform across TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Facebook, X, Snapchat, Pinterest, Threads and Bluesky, plus scheduling for all of it via Zernio or Metricool (how).

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Text posts, carousels and stories go through the same texts, scheduling and history as the table above shows (post types in the app).