Social media character limits
- X (Twitter): 280 characters for standard posts; verified/subscribed accounts can post significantly longer "articles".
- Instagram captions: up to 2,200 characters, though only the first couple of lines show before "more" — write your hook in the first 125 characters or so.
- Facebook posts: a very high limit (over 60,000 characters), but engagement data consistently favors much shorter posts, often under 80 characters.
- LinkedIn posts: up to 3,000 characters, with a "see more" cutoff around 210 characters on most feeds.
- TikTok captions: around 2,200 characters.
SEO fields
These matter for anyone writing for the web, since search engines truncate text that runs too long:
- Title tags: aim for roughly 50–60 characters; Google displays results based on pixel width, not a strict character count, but this range reliably avoids truncation.
- Meta descriptions: roughly 150–160 characters before Google's search snippet cuts it off with an ellipsis.
- URL slugs: no hard limit, but shorter, keyword-focused slugs (under ~60 characters) are easier to read and share.
Characters with spaces vs. without
Platforms are not always consistent about whether "character limit" includes spaces. Almost all modern platforms (X, Instagram, meta descriptions) count spaces as characters, the same as any other character. If you're ever unsure, assume spaces are counted — it's the safer assumption and matches how the WordlyCounter tool calculates both figures side by side.
Why character count and word count diverge
A sentence full of short words ("I do not know if it is on time") uses many words but relatively few characters. A sentence with long, technical words ("The interoperability documentation requires clarification") uses few words but many characters. If you're writing for a platform with a character limit, don't rely on a word count alone to estimate whether you'll fit — check the character count directly.
Practical tip: write with the limit visible
Rather than writing freely and cutting afterward, paste your draft into a live counter as you write. The WordlyCounter tool shows characters with and without spaces in real time, so you can see exactly how much room you have left before you hit publish.