Social media character limits for 2026

Character limits at a glance

*TikTok allows longer captions in its app than through scheduling tools that post via its API, which are limited to 2,200. Platforms change limits from time to time, so check the platform's help pages if a post is rejected.

How much actually shows

The maximum is rarely the length you should aim for. Most feeds show only the first line or two before cutting text off:

• Instagram shows about the first 125 characters of a caption before “more”. Put your hook and any call to action there.
• LinkedIn shows roughly the first 200 characters, or the first two or three lines, before “…see more”.
• Facebook trims posts after a few lines. Posts under 80 characters tend to get more engagement because they're read in full.
• YouTube titles are cut to about 60–70 characters in search results and on mobile, and the first 100–150 characters of the description show above the fold.
• Pinterest shows only the first 40 or so characters of a pin title in most feeds.

Google search results

Google doesn't use a fixed character limit; it cuts titles and descriptions by pixel width. As a rule of thumb:

• Title tags: keep them to about 50–60 characters so they aren't truncated.
• Meta descriptions: about 150–160 characters on desktop, and somewhat less on mobile.

Google may rewrite your title or description if it thinks another part of the page matches the search better, so write them to describe the page accurately rather than to stuff keywords.

SMS text messages

A single SMS holds 160 characters when it uses only the basic GSM alphabet (English letters, digits and common punctuation). Add a single emoji, a curly quote or a letter outside that set, and the whole message switches to Unicode, which allows only 70 characters. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 characters (or 67 in Unicode), and each part is billed as a separate message by most bulk SMS services.

How characters are counted

• Spaces and line breaks count as characters on every platform.
• Emoji often count as two characters, because they're stored as two code units. X also counts Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters as two.
• Links on X always count as 23 characters, however long the URL is.

Check your post before you publish

Paste your text into the character counter. It shows your count with and without spaces and has live bars for X, SMS, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google titles and descriptions, so you can see at a glance whether you're over the limit. You can also set a custom limit for any other platform.