What to Know About Character Limits

Writing share copy can be tricky, especially when trying to include the message, call-to-action, and story within the limits of each network. In this article, we'll go over the character limits for social networks so you can optimize content and improve engagement. Let's get started! 

What is a character

Typically, you hear someone talk about characters when referring to content. Characters are symbols with phonetic or pictographic meaning, such as the English alphabet being comprised of 26 characters (A through Z).

However, there are other complexities to consider when using characters online. Many languages and symbols must be coded in a way that takes up more space on the backend than they do to display. These characters—such as emojis 😊 and Chinese Japanese Korean (CJK) 㒨—are composed of multiple characters on the backend, even though the reader sees a single entity. They are called unicode and are often calculated at 2 characters, though some can be more.

While we’ve tried to simplify character counts, there is always a lot to consider. Due to this complexity, we’ve linked any known documentation from social networks that outline their policy for character counts.

🔷 Unicode characters, such as emojis 😊 and Chinese Japanese Korean (CJK) 㒨, are calculated on the final network’s platform. Please be sure to consider this when adding share copy that is close to reaching character limits.

Character limits

Here is a breakdown of known character limitations.

Internal commentary: Commentary for internal posts in EveryoneSocial. There is no character limit, and it is not included with the copy shared to social networks.

Twitter share copy: Content shared to Twitter.

• 280 character limit.
• Link posts have a max count of 256 because the link itself counts as 24 characters.
• Video posts have a max count of 256 because the video becomes a link to a Public Post Page, which counts as 24 characters.
• More information on Twitter’s character counts.

LinkedIn share copy: Content shared to LinkedIn profile and company pages.

• 3000 character limit.
• “…See more” truncates content around 200 characters.
• More information on LinkedIn’s character counts.

Facebook share copy: Content shared to Facebook.

• 1000 character limit.
• “…See more” truncates content around 140 characters.

Instagram share copy: Content shared to Instagram.

• 2200 character limit.
• “…See more” truncates content around 125 characters.

Disclosures: Admin-specified text to add to the end of share copy when users share a post. You will see this read as a "Note" at the bottom of the share copy. 

When Disclosures are required, their character count will be applied to the character limit. 

• Disclosure text’s character count + 2 spaces, 1 before and 1 after the disclosure.
• More information on Disclosures.