Character count
On social media, the length of a post often affects the impact of your content.
Following the character count rules of each platform means that your messages display fully on your profile or feed, conveying the information essential to converting your audience. Alternatively, go over the character count, and you risk posting confusing and truncated material.
It’s often difficult to master character counts on social media. Not only do the guidelines change at times but using the maximum character allowance isn’t always the best way to earn audience attention.
Character limits on social media
Learning the basics of the character count is a great way to refine and improve your social media strategy. Importantly, the maximum character count for a post and the ideal number of characters for engagement are two different things. For instance, Facebook posts can feature up to 63,206 characters, but a study by Jeff Bullas found that posts with fewer than 80 characters receive 66% more engagement.
Finding the right character count on each channel is a mixture of knowing your limits and knowing your audience. Some basic character count limitations to be aware of include:
- Facebook Posts: 63206 characters
- Facebook video and text ad copy: 90 characters
- Facebook image ad text: 90 characters
- Tweet (Twitter): 280 characters
- Twitter DM: 10,000 characters
- Twitter handle: 20 characters
- Twitter profile name: 20 characters
- Instagram caption: 2,200 characters
- Instagram bio: 150 characters
- Instagram username: 30 characters
- LinkedIn update: 700 characters
- LinkedIn about us: 2,000 characters
- LinkedIn Page name: 50 characters
- LinkedIn status update: 600 characters
- Pinterest profile name: 20 characters
- Pinterest board description: 500 characters
- Pinterest bio: 160 characters
YouTube
- YouTube video title: 70 characters
- YouTube video description: 5,000 characters
Finding the right character count
Though the maximum character count for each social media platform is a useful guide, it’s only a starting point for your posts.
The nature of the audience on each channel is an essential factor in managing character count. For example, people on LinkedIn are more likely to be searching for thought leadership posts and insights. Because of this, research into successful LinkedIn posts found that posts between 1900 and 2,000 words perform the best. On the other hand, most other social channels get better results from a short and sweet character count.
On Instagram, captions can be up to 2,200 words long, but people scrolling through pictures don’t want to read that much. It makes sense to keep your character count short and punchy.
Tracking your character count
The best way to choose the right character count for your brand is to pay attention to your audience. Use maximum limits and online suggestions to guide your initial posts, then measure the response your audience has to different content lengths.
You may need to experiment to find out which posts resonate best with your audience. Fortunately, it’s possible to measure the characters in each post accurately with tools like our character counter to ensure you play it safe with each post.