Character counter per platform

What it's for

Every social has a different limit: this tool instantly tells you whether your post, caption or bio fits the limit of the chosen platform.

Note

The count treats emoji and special characters as a single character, just like the platforms do. If the limit stopping you is a chat's, like ChatGPT or Claude, there is Split a long text for AI.

Why an emoji counts as more than one character

Platforms say they count «characters», but computer systems count code units, and the two coincide only for Latin letters. A common emoji takes two units, and a composed one — a flag, a family, an emoji with a skin tone — can take eight or ten, because it is made of several symbols joined by invisible characters.

It is why a text that looks short gets rejected: five emoji can be worth twenty characters or more. The same applies to non-Latin alphabets and to Indic scripts, where one visible syllable can be composed of three or four separately counted signs.

Links do not count as what they look like

On X a web address is replaced by a shortened version and counts as a fixed length whatever the real link: one of two hundred characters and one of thirty weigh the same. On LinkedIn and Facebook, instead, the link counts in full, and putting a long address in a short post can push it over the limit.

Then there are line breaks, which almost everywhere count as one character each: a text formatted with blank lines between paragraphs pays a dozen characters in spacing alone, and that is the difference that pushes a seemingly fine post over the limit.

The real limit is the truncation, not the rejection

Nearly every platform accepts texts far longer than what it displays: an Instagram caption goes up to two thousand two hundred characters, but in the feed about one hundred and twenty-five are readable before the «more». On LinkedIn the cut is around two hundred, on Facebook it changes with the device.

Hence the rule that really matters: whatever has to be read goes in the first two lines. The rest is for people who have already decided to open it, and it is useful, but it is not what decides whether anyone stops. It is the same principle as newspaper headlines, and it is why captions opening with a question work better than those opening with a greeting.

Text that survives copy and paste

Writing a post in a word processor and pasting it is convenient but brings surprises: curly quotes, em dashes and non-breaking spaces are counted as normal characters but can appear wrong in some apps, and certain bulleted lists become symbols that take up more than they seem.

It is also worth remembering that the special characters of stylised fonts — the ones used to write in bold in bios — are not letters: they count for more, they are unreadable by screen readers and they are not found by the platforms' internal search.

Nearby tools

For counting in general there is Word counter and Social character counter. For the texts there are Bio generator and Caption generator, and for stylised characters Special fonts for your bio.