Your content might look great on your laptop. But your audience is almost certainly not on their laptop.
According to Priori Data and BroadbandSearch, around 98% of social media users access platforms via mobile devices. That is not a stat to note and move on from. It should shape every creative decision you make.
Here are four ways to make your content work for the device your audience is holding.
01
Think vertically, not horizontally
Most people scroll with one thumb. The content that performs best in 2026 is built for that reality.
Instagram updated its grid format in 2025, shifting away from the classic square crop toward a taller 3:4 rectangle. The platform now favours portrait orientation across the feed, and its own data reflects that. Portrait posts at 4:5 (1080 x 1350 px) consistently outperform square images because they take up more screen space and stay in view longer as someone scrolls.
For feed posts, 4:5 portrait (1080 x 1350 px) is now the default to design for. For Stories and Reels, 9:16 vertical (1080 x 1920 px) fills the full screen.
If you are designing content in landscape, you are designing for desktop. Most of your audience will never see it the way you intended.
02
Keep visuals simple and focused
Small screens punish complexity. An image that reads well at full size on a monitor can become unreadable on a phone, particularly if there is too much going on in the frame.
Health and wellness brands tend to do well here because the category lends itself to clean, considered imagery. A single hero product, a close crop of an ingredient, a still life with one strong focal point. These are the kinds of visuals that translate well across every screen size.
03
Short video outperforms long video, but captions matter more than length
Short-form video now accounts for 58% of total time spent on social media, according to Digital Applied. Reels, Shorts, and TikTok content dominate. Instagram’s own algorithm gives Reels significantly more reach than static posts, and TikTok maintains a 72% completion rate on videos under 30 seconds. The appetite for short video is not slowing down.
But the length is only part of the picture. Research consistently shows that a large proportion of social video is watched without sound, particularly on mobile when people are in public or shared spaces. Captions mean your video works for people watching on mute, which, on mobile, is most of them.
Most platforms now offer automatic captioning tools. Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn all support auto-captions on video content. Use them, and then check them. Auto-generated captions are often imperfect, and a captioning error on a health or wellness brand could be embarrassing.
Adding captions also improves accessibility for those who are hard of hearing or watching in a noisy environment, and it gives platforms more text to index, which supports discovery.
04
Test on your phone before you post
This one is straightforward and consistently skipped. Before a post goes live, look at it on your phone. Not in a preview window on your laptop. On your actual phone, in the actual app.
Check whether text is legible at that size. Check whether the key visual is centred and not at risk of being cropped by the grid thumbnail. Check whether a new follower arriving at your profile would see a coherent set of visuals, or something that looks designed for a different device entirely.
The brands with the most consistent social presence treat the phone screen as the final checkpoint, not an afterthought.
Want help with this?
If you want a social media partner who understands the health and wellness category and gets the detail right, get in touch.
Original post: 2020
When we think about social media, we often hear that the most important thing to focus on is making content appropriate for the audience and the specific platform. But what about the device that we and our audience are browsing on?
Phones, tablets, laptops, computers… even televisions and smart watches. All of these are perfectly viable ways that your target audience might be accessing your content – and so understanding how to keep your visuals optimised for those different devices is key to social success.
Here are our four tips to creating social content which is as great for mobile as it is for a laptop screen.
1. Focus on how each platform posts images. On Instagram, keep your feed content square, and your Stories content vertical, for optimised viewing on a smartphone.
2. Choose simple images that focus on one thing. This could be a spotlight product, a service, or even your logo or a single word defining your brand.
3. If you choose to post videos, keep them short and sweet. Remember that those browsing their social media on a mobile device are likely on the move or about to move onto a new activity, and so are far more likely to engage with something they can watch in seconds rather than minutes. If you do have a longer video to post, use the IGTV added to the platform in 2020.
4. Add text and subtitles to videos so that they can be watched and understood without sound. Not only does this make your videos great for social situations, but it also makes them more accessible for those who may not be able to hear or understand the video completely.
Some of the most effective social campaigns which work across multiple devices and platforms are those with the simplest visuals and the most obvious messages. Remember not to lose your overall goal in a complex campaign – keep it simple!
