Character Limit Checker
Check your text against 10 platform limits simultaneously — Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, email subject lines and meta descriptions. Live colour-coded bars update as you type. Emoji counted correctly for Twitter.
Character Limit Checker Tool
10 platforms simultaneously, correct emoji counting, truncation preview — features most character counters skip
Most character counters show one platform at a time. This tool checks all 10 simultaneously so you can see at a glance whether your text fits Twitter AND LinkedIn AND your meta description without switching tabs. Emoji are counted correctly for Twitter (2 chars each), and a truncation preview shows exactly where your text gets cut off on each platform.
How to check character limits for social media
Character limits by platform — 2026
| Platform | Limit | Field | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Twitter / X | 280 | Tweet | Emoji count as 2. URLs count as 23 regardless of actual length. Premium users: 25,000. |
| Twitter / X | 160 | Bio | Profile bio visible on your profile page |
| 2,200 | Caption | Only 125 chars visible without tapping "more". Hashtags count toward the limit. | |
| 150 | Bio | Profile bio. No clickable links allowed in bio text. | |
| 3,000 | Post | Posts truncate at ~210 chars in the feed without "see more" | |
| 220 | Headline | Profile headline shown under your name | |
| TikTok | 2,200 | Caption | Caption beneath the video |
| TikTok | 80 | Bio | Profile bio |
| YouTube | 100 | Title | Search results truncate title at ~70 chars |
| YouTube | 5,000 | Description | Search snippets show ~157 chars |
| 63,206 | Post | Effectively unlimited for most use cases | |
| 65,536 | Message | Per message. Status updates: 700 chars. | |
| SMS | 160 | Message | GSM-7 encoding. Drops to 70/segment with emoji or Unicode. |
| Email subject | 60 | Subject line | Gmail desktop preview. Mobile: ~40 chars. Recommended: under 50. |
| Google meta title | 60 | Page title | SERP display. Truncated to ~580px width. |
| Google meta desc | 155 | Meta description | SERP snippet. Can be up to 920px width. Front-load key info. |
Character Limits by Platform — A Complete Guide for Social Media and SEO
Every platform has character limits, and every platform enforces them differently. Twitter cuts you off hard at 280. Instagram lets you write 2,200 characters but buries everything after the first 125 behind a "more" tap. LinkedIn gives you 3,000 characters but truncates in the feed after around 210. SMS silently switches from 160 characters per segment to 70 when you add a single emoji. Knowing these limits — and the nuances within them — is the difference between copy that lands and copy that gets cut off mid-sentence.
Twitter character counter with emoji support
Twitter's 280-character limit has one critical nuance that most character counters miss: emoji count as 2 characters, not 1. This is because Twitter's character counting system uses a weighted scheme based on the Unicode code point range. Characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (U+0000 to U+FFFF) count as 1. Characters outside it — including most emoji — count as 2. A tweet like "Great day! 😊" appears to be 13 characters long but Twitter counts it as 14. If you're writing a tweet with several emoji, the discrepancy can be significant. URLs are also special: any URL, regardless of length, is always counted as exactly 23 characters by Twitter's system.
Instagram caption character limit checker
Instagram allows captions up to 2,200 characters long, but in practice only the first 125 characters are visible in the feed before users see a "more" prompt. Research consistently shows that most users don't tap "more" — meaning everything after character 125 effectively has a fraction of the visibility of the opening line. This makes the first 125 characters the most important real estate in your caption. Hashtags count toward the 2,200 character limit. Instagram bios are limited to 150 characters and don't support clickable links in the text itself.
LinkedIn post character counter online
LinkedIn's 3,000-character post limit is the most generous of the major social platforms, reflecting its professional audience and long-form content culture. However, LinkedIn also truncates posts in the feed at approximately 210 characters before showing a "see more" link. The first 210 characters of your LinkedIn post function as a hook: they need to be compelling enough to make readers click through. The headline field on your profile is limited to 220 characters and appears prominently in search results and connection requests — front-loading your most relevant keywords and value proposition here has direct SEO value within LinkedIn's own search.
SMS character limit counter free
SMS character limits are more complex than most people realise. Standard SMS uses GSM-7 encoding, which covers the basic Latin alphabet, digits, and common punctuation. A single SMS segment can hold 160 GSM-7 characters. When you need to send longer messages, they are split into multi-part messages: each segment can hold 153 characters (the remaining 7 characters are used for concatenation headers). However, if your message contains any character outside the GSM-7 character set — including emoji, curly quotes, accented characters not in the basic Latin set, or any non-Latin script — the entire message switches to UCS-2 Unicode encoding. In UCS-2 mode, a single segment holds only 70 characters, and multi-part segments hold 67. A single emoji in your SMS means all 160 characters become 70, potentially splitting a message that would have been one segment into three.
YouTube description character limit
YouTube video titles are limited to 100 characters, but search results typically display around 60-70 characters before truncating. The most important keywords for SEO should appear in the first 60 characters of the title. YouTube descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters long — a generous limit that supports in-depth content summaries, chapter timestamps, links and call-to-actions. In search results, YouTube shows approximately 157 characters of the description. In the video page itself, only the first 3 lines are shown without expanding.
Meta description character limit checker
Google does not have a hard character limit for meta descriptions — it has a pixel width limit of approximately 920px for desktop snippets. In practice, this corresponds to roughly 155-160 characters for typical Latin text. Non-Latin characters (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic) are typically wider and may truncate at fewer characters. Google may also generate its own snippet from the page content if it determines your meta description doesn't match the search query well. The best practice is to keep meta descriptions under 155 characters, front-load the most important information, and include the primary keyword near the beginning.