Most weeks the question I hear is “what should we post?” It is the wrong first question. The better one is “where does this go?”, because the answer settles the format, the length, the crop and the ask without anyone having to argue about them later.
Two placements, two different jobs.
The feed is the shelf
A feed post is durable. It sits on your profile, it is the thing a stranger scrolls after someone mentions you, and it is what a search or a recommendation can surface months from now. It is also, for most small accounts, the first impression: nobody has ever decided to follow a company because of a story they had no reason to open.
Because it lasts, a feed post has to survive being read cold, by someone with no context, at a random moment. It should stand alone. It should look deliberate. It can be edited and reconsidered before it goes out, and it should be.
That durability is also a cost. A feed post is a commitment, and if you commit three times a week you had better have three things worth shelving.
The practical test is whether you would be happy for someone to find this post six months from now with no idea what week it came from. If the answer is no, it was never a feed post.
Stories are today
A story exists for a day. Nobody finds it later, nobody searches it, and the people who see it are mostly people who already follow you.
That is a different position, and it has its own strengths. An audience that already follows you does not need convincing that you exist. They need a reason to keep paying attention, which is what the unpolished material is for: the half-built thing on the screen, the box that arrived, the question you are actually stuck on.
Stories also tolerate sequence in a way the feed does not. Four frames, one step each, is a natural shape for a story set and an awkward one for a feed post.
And stories can ask. A poll, a question box, a reply. The feed gets you comments from people performing in public; stories get you sentences from people typing privately, which are usually more honest and more useful.
The feed gets you comments from people performing in public; stories get you sentences from people typing privately.
The decision comes before the draft
Here is the practical consequence. Choose the placement before you write a word, because everything downstream is different.
The shape is different. A feed image is square or portrait and the reader controls how long they look at it. A story is full screen and vertical, and it advances on a timer unless the viewer holds a thumb down.
Text size follows from that. On a story, copy has to be readable in the time it takes to not tap away, which is about two seconds, which means a handful of very large words. The same paragraph that works comfortably in a feed caption becomes an unreadable block on a story frame.
Safe areas follow too. The top and bottom strips of a story are occupied by the platform’s own chrome, the profile row at the top and the reply field at the bottom. Copy placed there gets covered. A feed post has no such problem, which is exactly why a feed image resized to vertical and pushed to stories always looks wrong.
The ask is different as well. A feed post can afford a call to action that takes effort, because the reader chose their own pace: read the linked piece, save this, tell me where I am wrong. A story call to action has to be one gesture. Tap the link. Vote. Answer one question. Anything requiring a decision will lose to the next frame.
There is a third consequence, which is who does the work. A feed post deserves a second pair of eyes, because it is going on the shelf and a typo there lives for a year. A story does not, and requiring approval on stories is the fastest way to stop having any. Decide the placement and you have also decided how much process the thing needs, which in a team of two or three is the difference between publishing and meaning to.
A week that uses both
The version I keep coming back to is three feed posts and two story sets.
Monday, a feed post carrying the week’s strongest claim. Wednesday, a feed post that is useful on its own, the kind of thing someone saves. Friday, a feed post with lower stakes, an aside or something you nearly cut.
Tuesday, a story set showing how Wednesday’s post got made. Thursday, a story set that asks one question, and then you read the replies, because that is where next week’s Monday post usually comes from.
What makes this work is that the two feed off each other rather than competing for the same material. The stories are made from the making of the feed posts, so they cost almost nothing extra, and the questions asked in stories supply the feed posts. A week where the two are planned separately turns into five things to invent; a week where they are planned together turns into three, with the rest falling out as a byproduct.
The feed builds the shelf. The stories keep the people already on it listening, and quietly tell you what to put on the shelf next.
Placement is a property of the post
In Markowill, a post carries its placement, feed, story or reel, and that choice picks both the slide size the creative is built at and the networks that can publish it. A network with no story surface refuses a story rather than quietly publishing it as an ordinary feed post, which is the failure mode worth avoiding: a vertical frame silently cropped into a square, on the shelf, permanently.
Where to start
Take the next thing on your list and answer one question before you open the editor: does this need to last, or does it need to be seen today?
Write the answer down beside the idea. If you cannot answer it, the idea is not ready, and ten seconds of deciding has saved you an hour of designing the wrong thing.
