Character Limits for X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube
Paste a caption or draft and the counter shows where it stands against 15 limits — X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and more — turning red the moment a text passes one.
Green means it fits. Red means the platform will cut you off mid-sentence.
Which limits actually matter
Most of this table never binds. The ones that do, daily: the 280-character X limit (the only major platform that hard-rejects), the 150-character Instagram bio, the 100-character YouTube title, and the 60/160 pair for SEO meta tags. Facebook’s 63,206-character ceiling exists so a post can hold a whole article, not because anyone approaches it.
There is also a difference between the limit and the cut-off. Instagram accepts 2,200 characters in a caption but truncates what shows in the feed around the first 125, with the rest behind “more”. LinkedIn and YouTube descriptions behave the same way. If the first line carries your point, the truncation costs you nothing; if the hook is at the end, nobody sees it.
Characters, words and bytes are not the same count
Every limit in the table is in characters, and a character is one letter, digit, space or punctuation mark — emoji count as two characters on X because they sit outside the basic set. Words are what an essay asks for; characters are what a field box enforces. That is why the counter above reports both, plus sentences and reading time, from the same paste.
SMS is the special case: 160 characters of the Latin alphabet is one message, and longer texts are split into multiple parts that cost separately — a 480-character message is billed as four. URLs pasted into messages also tend to be long before the platform shortens them, which is why the counter includes a link counter beside the totals.
SEO limits are about pixels, not rules
Google does not reject a 70-character meta title — it truncates it in the results page based on pixel width, which lands around 60 characters for most titles. The same applies to meta descriptions at roughly 155–160. Treat 60 and 160 as the safe envelope rather than a validator’s rule, and put the important words first so a truncation mid-sentence still leaves the meaning intact.
Writing to a fixed count? The word counter page carries the same live limit bars with the full stats panel, and text cleaner trims the extra spaces that quietly eat characters before you even start counting.
- Paste your text — Caption, bio, title, meta description — anything with a length rule.
- Watch the limit bars — Each platform fills green towards its cap and turns red past it, so you see which rules you are close to breaking.
- Check the stats line — Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and keyword density update with every keystroke.
- Copy it out — One click copies the cleaned text, spaces and all, straight into the platform that asked for it.
- Fifteen live limits instead of memorising which platform takes what.
- Counts words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time from the same paste.
- Keyword density shows which words dominate a draft before you post it.
- Nothing is stored — the draft never leaves your browser.
Character Limits for Social Media — questions
How many characters in a tweet / X post?
280. Links count against it even after X shortens them, and some characters outside the basic alphabet count double.
What is the Instagram caption character limit?
2,200 characters for the caption itself. The feed truncates the display around 125 characters with a “more” link, so the hook belongs in the first line even though the full text is accepted.
How long can an Instagram bio be?
150 characters, and links typed into the bio text are not clickable — the single website field is the only tappable link.
How long should a meta description be?
Around 155–160 characters. Google truncates by pixel width rather than a fixed count, so 160 is the safe envelope; front-load the important phrase in case the cut lands early.
Do hashtags count in the Instagram limit?
Yes — anything in the caption box counts, hashtags included. The 30-hashtag rule is a separate limit on the number of hashtags, not on characters.
Why does my SMS show as three messages?
One SMS is 160 characters of standard text; longer messages split into parts of about 153 (the rest carries joining data). A 480-character text becomes four billed segments, which is why the counter lists SMS beside the social limits.