Social Media Character Counter

One counter, every platform's limit at once

Every social platform enforces its own character limit, and they're all different: 280 for a standard X/Twitter post, 2,200 for an Instagram caption, 3,000 for LinkedIn, 100 for a YouTube title. Writing a caption you plan to reuse across platforms usually means checking each limit separately, or finding out you're over after you hit "post." This tool counts your text once and checks it against every major platform's limit at the same time, with a progress bar and a live "characters left" (or "characters over") count for each one.

How to use it

• Type or paste your text into the box — a caption, tweet, bio, video title, or any copy you're about to publish.
• Watch the character, word, and sentence counts update as you type.
• Scroll the platform grid below to see exactly how much room you have left (or how far over you are) for X/Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Threads, Discord, Reddit, and SMS all at once.
• A bar turns yellow at 90% of a platform's limit and red once you're over it, so you can spot which platforms need trimming at a glance.

Why platform limits matter beyond just "fitting"

Getting cut off isn't just about hard limits — on some platforms, going over doesn't reject your post, it truncates it or hides the rest behind a "see more" link, which changes how many people actually read your full message. Staying comfortably under a platform's limit (not just squeaking in under it) also tends to leave room for hashtags, mentions, or a call-to-action you might want to add after the main copy.

Real-world use cases

• Cross-posting the same caption: Write once, then check whether it needs trimming for X/Twitter before you also post the full version to Instagram or LinkedIn.
• Writing YouTube titles and descriptions: YouTube titles get cut off in search results well before the 100-character technical limit, so keeping an eye on the count helps you front-load the important words.
• Checking a bio update: Instagram and similar bios have much tighter limits (150 characters) than a regular post, and it's easy to write a bio that's too long without realizing until you try to save it.
• SMS/text marketing copy: A standard SMS segment is 160 characters — going over splits your message into multiple segments, which can affect cost and delivery depending on your provider.

Frequently asked questions

Does this tool count emoji or hashtags differently?

Emoji, hashtags, @mentions, and links are all counted as regular characters here, the same way most platforms count them for their limits (X/Twitter is a partial exception, since it treats links as a fixed short length regardless of the actual URL's size).

What's the actual X/Twitter character limit?

Standard accounts are limited to 280 characters per post. X Premium (paid) subscribers get a much higher limit, up to 4,000 characters — both are included here so you can check against whichever applies to your account.

Why does my Instagram caption look fine in the app but this tool shows it as long?

Instagram's 2,200-character caption limit is generous, but captions longer than about 125 characters get truncated with a "more" link in the feed itself — the limit is about the maximum you're allowed to write, not about what's visible without a tap.

Why is Facebook's limit so much higher than everywhere else?

Facebook allows posts up to 63,206 characters, far beyond what's practical to actually write or read in a single post — in practice, engagement research generally favors much shorter Facebook posts regardless of the technical ceiling.