Character Limits for Social Networks & Posting Parameters

Hello and welcome to 24SevenSocial’s blog space. Today we will talk about the character limits for social networks as well as the posting parameters we should all be following to increase our organic social media exposure, and improve our paid social ads results. We have created an easy to use cheat sheet and also added a special surprise for you.

We all know that creating a social media marketing calendar for your business may be challenging!

There’s a lot to think about and lots of factors to consider. Starting from selecting how to modify your content for each social media channel, compelling themes, acceptable content formats, publishing schedules, and the optimum times to post on each network. If that wasn’t enough, each social media network has its own set of rules and character limits, which appear to change constantly. That’s why, in this helpful guide, we’ve compiled the most recent, most up-to-date social network post standards. 

 Great news for those of you who use 24SevenSocial as your social media management tool.

Why? As you know we aim to make your social media life as pleasant as possible. Hence we added a new character counter to help you manage the character limit for each social network much easier. As each network has different limits, you will see that in your 24SevenSocial interface, we have divided the counters to reflect and show the recommended limit for each channel. In addition to the different limits, the social networks also have a specific way of counting emojis symbols.

As you can see in the example above, Twitter has a different way of “counting” the characters used in the post. The new character counter will help you oversee a full breakdown of all the characters on the different social media channels you post your organic or paid content. Moreover, this will make it easier for you to follow the industry’s best practices and achieve great results.  

In case you are not using 24SevenSocial yet, we have a super special surprise for you.

Try the tool for a whopping 14 days completely free and see what you think of it and how it can help with your business’s social media activities.

Going back to our main topic on character limits for social networks. Continue reading to discover more about each platform’s requirements, as well as some best practices suggestions. 

 Let’s start with Facebook. 

*Of course, just because Facebook allows for more than 63K characters to be used in a post doesn’t mean we should. To put things into perspective 63K characters are the equivalent of between 9000 to 15750 words. Visitors are unlikely to read an article of that length in its entirety. Our advice is to use shorter, easy to read and understand the type of content. In our experience, shorter posts get more engagement and perform better in the social media field of Facebook. On that note, ur advice is to use between 50 to 80 characters for both paid and organic posts. This way, your text is clearly visible without the “See more” option. 

 Moving onto Instagram: 

**Similarly to Facebook, the character limit for Instagram is higher than what you need. For example, if you use all 2,200 characters, your visitor will have to click the “See more” button to see the rest of your article, so keep your captions brief. To ensure that your whole caption is shown in the Instagram feed, keep it under 125 characters. As we know the use of hashtags on Instagram is very important. According to TrackMaven using between 5-9 hashtags for your Instagram posts is ideal. 

 We also have some useful information to share on Twitter: 

Despite Twitter’s character limit expansion from 140 to 280 characters, we have noticed that shorter tweets receive much higher engagement rates. According to studies, shorter tweets (71–100 characters) are appreciated and retweeted more than lengthier ones. Remember that @ mentions, gifs, and photos don’t count against the character limit of a tweet; however, links do, but they’ll be truncated to 23 characters.

 Last, but not least, here are LinkedIn’s character limits and best practices: 

Unlike the majority of the other platforms, LinkedIn is a text-based social network. This is mostly owing to its function as a centralized resume. A LinkedIn status should be approximately 100 characters long. Furthermore, messages are chopped off at roughly 140 characters and then you need to click on the “See More” option. In terms of article length recommendations, try to stick to 3,000 characters.

The ever-changing rules and character limits for social networks can make capturing the attention of your potential audience challenging. We created this cheat sheet to help with your organic and paid social media activities. Feel free to bookmark it and refer back to the information you need for your successful social media marketing strategy. Last but not least, you may find our Social Media Posting Times cheat sheet useful to help you solidify your social media strategy even further.