Social Media Character Limits: The Complete Cheat Sheet

Every text field on a social platform has a hard limit — the most characters it will accept — and, for longer fields, a preview point where the text is cut off behind "more" or "see more". The hard limit decides whether you can post at all. The preview point decides what most people will actually read.

Most creators only learn the first number, usually when an app refuses to post. The second number matters more: it is the space in which your post has to earn attention.

• •Caption: 2,200 characters. About the first 125 show in the feed before "more".
• •Bio: 150 characters.
• •Hashtags: Instagram recommends 3–5; it allowed up to 30 for years and announced a lower cap in late 2025.
• •Username: 30 characters.

• •Caption: 4,000 characters. Only the first line or two show over the video.
• •Bio: 80 characters.

• •Title: 100 characters. Often cut after roughly 60–70 characters in search and suggested videos.
• •Description: 5,000 characters. Roughly the first 100–150 show before "more".
• •Hashtags: if there are more than 15, YouTube ignores all of them.
• •The characters < and > are not allowed in titles or descriptions.

• •X post: 280 weighted characters for standard accounts. Emoji and many non-Latin characters count as 2, and every link counts as 23.
• •Threads post: 500 characters.
• •LinkedIn post: 3,000 characters, with roughly the first 200 visible before "see more". Headline: 220 characters.
• •Facebook post: 63,206 characters. Long posts collapse behind "See more".
• •Pinterest: pin title 100 characters, pin description 500 characters.

A character is not always what you see. Emoji like 👍🏽 or family emoji are built from several code points, and many editors count each one. Accented letters can be stored as one or two code points depending on where you typed them. Platforms make their own choices about all of this, so a caption that "fits" in your notes app can come out a few characters over.

The safest approach is to leave a margin of 5–10 characters on tight fields like bios, and to use a counter that counts visible characters — the Social Media Character Counter on this site shows every limit above at once and counts X's weighting separately.

A few habits make the visible part of your text do its job:

• •Put the payoff, the question, or the most specific detail in the first sentence.
• •Don't open with a greeting, the date, or "So…". They use up the preview without giving a reason to keep reading.
• •Keep the first line short enough to be read whole on a phone.
• •Move links, credits, and hashtags to the end.