Channel-specific cuts — Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, email

Why one draft cannot serve all channels

Every platform has, over years of use, trained its audience to expect a specific kind of post. The platform’s algorithm rewards the posts that match the expectation and quietly buries the ones that don’t. This is not a guess — it is the daily experience of every marketer running paid and organic in Nepal.

Facebook, in Nepal, lives on emotional immediacy and image-text pairs. The reader is scrolling past a wedding photo, a political meme, and a relative’s puja album. The post that stops them opens with a specific human moment — a name, a scene, a feeling — and is paired with an image that does half the work. Eighty words is a long Facebook post. The voice is closer to spoken Nepali than to written marketing.

TikTok is the dominant attention channel for Nepalis under thirty-five. The hook lives in the first second of the video and the first word of the caption. There is no warm-up. The caption is short — often under 200 characters — and the algorithm rewards the post that gets a thumb-stop in the first frame. A Facebook-length caption on TikTok reads as someone who does not understand the platform.

LinkedIn, in Nepal, is a smaller but more concentrated audience — B2B buyers, recruiters, founders, the people who matter for enterprise deals and senior hires. The register is more professional, the post is longer (three to five short paragraphs), and the voice can be English-led with Nepali context woven in. A TikTok-style hook on LinkedIn reads as thirsty; a Facebook-style emotional opener reads as off-brand.

Email subject lines have a 50-character window before mobile clients truncate them. Within that window, a specific number beats a vague claim, a question often beats a statement, and the word “you” almost always beats “we”. This is the most format-constrained channel of the four and the one most marketers neglect most.

The channel-brief prompt pattern

The pattern that produces the four cuts in one prompt is straightforward, and it is one of the few times where a longer prompt genuinely pays off. You give the model the underlying message once, then you specify the four channels as a structured list with the constraints of each.

A working version, for a Daraz Dashain offer:

Take the following message — “Up to 60 percent off across electronics, fashion, and home appliances on Daraz this Dashain, with free delivery in Kathmandu Valley on orders over Rs. 2,000” — and produce four channel-native cuts.

Facebook (Nepali-first, 80 words, opens with a specific Dashain scene or feeling, image-pairable, never starts with “Big Sale”): … TikTok caption (under 200 characters, hook in word 1, no hedges, mention the percentage in the first five words): … LinkedIn post (4 short paragraphs, professional register, English with Nepali context where useful, frames the offer as a peak-season operations story for B2B partners): … Email subject line (under 50 characters, specific number, no exclamation mark, no all-caps): provide three options.

The output is four genuinely different pieces of writing that share an underlying claim but match the register of each platform. The Facebook post opens with a scene of a family unpacking a new TV. The TikTok caption opens with “60% off.” The LinkedIn post talks about Dashain as the year’s largest retail window and what that means for inventory partners. The email subjects are three tight options, each under 50 characters, each tested against the rules.

Respecting how Nepalis use each platform

Beyond the format, each channel has a specific use-pattern in Nepal that you fight at your cost.

Facebook is the dominant paid-ad channel. More than seventy percent of digital ad spend in the country goes here. It is also the channel where the over-35 audience lives — the aunties and uncles who make household purchase decisions, the SME owners who buy B2B services, the donors who fund the INGO appeals. A campaign that under-invests in Facebook in Nepal is leaving the largest addressable audience in the country on the table. The voice has to feel like a person who could be in the family group chat — not a brand broadcasting.

TikTok is the dominant attention channel. Under-thirties spend more time here than on any other platform. The advertising opportunity is real but the organic opportunity is larger — a TikTok that goes viral does work no paid Facebook campaign can match. The cost is that the platform is brutal about hooks. A caption that starts with “Hey everyone, today we wanted to share…” is dead before the second second. The voice is close, casual, and starts with the payoff.

LinkedIn is for B2B and recruiting. In Nepal it is small but high-signal. If you are selling enterprise software, raising capital, or hiring senior engineers, this is the channel that matters. The voice is more measured, the post is longer, and the audience reads in English. A Nepali-language post on LinkedIn in Nepal is a deliberate choice — and sometimes the right one — but it is not the default.

Email subject line discipline

Email is the most measurable channel, and the subject line is the most measurable part of email. A 5-percentage-point lift in open rate compounds across every campaign for the rest of the quarter. This is the highest-leverage 50 characters in your marketing.

Four rules the model will follow if you ask it to:

A specific number beats a vague claim. “Save Rs. 2,400 this Dashain” beats “Big savings this Dashain”. The number gives the reader something to hold; the vague claim gives them nothing.

A question often beats a statement. “Have you checked your TDS for Jestha?” beats “Reminder: TDS deadline for Jestha”. The question implies the reader might have missed something; the statement implies the sender is the boss of their inbox.

Under 50 characters beats over 50. Mobile clients truncate. The clipped subject line that ends at ”…” loses the punchline. Count characters before you send.

No exclamation marks, no all-caps. Both read as spam, both reduce trust, both have been shown in countless tests to lower opens.

A working prompt:

Produce three email subject lines for a Khalti referral campaign. Constraints: under 50 characters each, a specific number in at least two of them, one question, zero exclamation marks, zero all-caps, plain language. The reader is a Khalti user in Lalitpur who has not referred anyone in six months.

The output, in seconds, is three subject lines you can A/B test against each other. The discipline produces tested copy in less time than it used to take to write one unloved subject line by hand.

Check your understanding

Quick check

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A colleague writes one AI-drafted paragraph about a Dashain offer and proposes posting the same text, unchanged, as a Facebook post, a TikTok caption, a LinkedIn update, and an email subject line. Is the same text equally effective on all four channels?

1. ATrue — if the underlying message is good, the channel does not matter.
2. BFalse — each channel has its own register, length, format, and audience habits (Facebook lives on emotional immediacy and image-pairs, TikTok needs the hook in word one and under 200 characters, LinkedIn rewards a longer professional cut, email subjects must fit under 50 characters), and a single draft will under-perform on at least three of them. The workflow that wins is the channel-brief prompt that produces four cuts from one underlying message.
3. CTrue — but only for B2C campaigns.
4. DFalse — but only for English-language campaigns, not Nepali.

Check answer→

What comes next

Drafting copy and producing channel cuts are the unit-of-work skills. The next chapter, on campaigns and creative, steps up a level — from the single post to the multi-asset campaign that has to hold together across a four-week run, with paid, organic, email, and creative production all sharing the same underlying story.