Social Media Post Character Counter

You're crafting a post and trying to hit the sweet spot for the platform you're publishing to. Twitter caps at 280 characters (or 25,000 for premium accounts, but few care). LinkedIn truncates at around 200 characters before "see more." Instagram caption limit is 2,200 but engagement tends to drop off well before that. Each platform's rules are slightly different and the truncation points (where the "more" link appears) matter as much as the absolute limits.

Paste your draft. The counter shows you the limit for each major platform side-by-side, plus the truncation point if you go over. Useful for cross-posting, where the same draft might fit Twitter but get cut on the LinkedIn preview. URLs and emoji count toward the total — emoji often count as 2 characters because of how Unicode encoding works on the underlying platforms.

The platform specifics worth knowing: Twitter's 280 limit counts most characters as 1, but some emoji and CJK characters as 2. URLs are auto-shortened to 23 characters regardless of original length, so a long URL doesn't actually cost you much. LinkedIn's hard limit is 3,000 characters but the preview cuts at around 200 (desktop) or 140 (mobile). Instagram caption hard limit is 2,200, with the visible portion before "more" running about 125 characters. Facebook posts can be much longer (63,206 characters) but engagement drops sharply past the first 250. Threads (Meta's Twitter clone) has a 500-character limit. TikTok captions cap at 2,200 with a much smaller visible portion before the truncation.

A worked example: you write a 180-character thought you want to cross-post. On Twitter, fits comfortably under 280 — full post visible. On LinkedIn, fits under 200, no "see more" needed — full post visible without click. On Instagram, well under 2,200, but most visitors only see the first 125 characters before "more," so the back half of your post gets cut for casual scrollers. The counter makes the trade-offs visible: same content, different visibility per platform. Adjust by either trimming for Instagram or planning to put the most important part in the first 125 characters.

Where the counter helps and where it doesn't: it tells you what fits, not what works. Optimal post length per platform is also engagement-dependent — Twitter posts at 70-100 characters often outperform 280-character ones; LinkedIn posts at 1,500-2,000 characters often outperform brief ones; Instagram captions at 100-150 characters outperform either extreme. The counter gives you the technical limits, not the engagement guidance. For multi-platform posting, a common approach is to write the longest version first, then edit ruthlessly down for platforms with shorter visible windows. The same idea, three lengths, beats one-length-fits-all.