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Social media character counter

Count characters against the real limits for X, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Threads. Emoji-safe, live as you type, nothing uploaded.

Which counter do you need

Pick the platform you are publishing to, because the ceilings are not close to each other and neither are the reasons they exist. Each page counts against every surface that platform offers, so a bio and a post can be checked without leaving it.

  • X (Twitter): the tightest budget here at 280 characters, low enough that the ceiling shapes the sentence rather than catching a mistake at the end of it.
  • Instagram: a caption ceiling of 2,200 next to a bio of 150, so which surface you are writing for decides everything.
  • LinkedIn: three fields that behave nothing alike, and the headline that follows you around the platform is the one almost nobody counts.
  • TikTok: the shortest bio of any major platform at 80 characters, with hashtags coming out of the same budget as the words.
  • Facebook: the one place where the post ceiling is effectively irrelevant and the short fields around it are not.
  • YouTube: a title judged in a search result and a description judged above the fold, both far shorter in practice than the limits they are given.
  • Threads: a hard 500 characters with no paid tier to raise it, so the editing happens before you post rather than after.

Nobody agrees on what a character is

Ask three tools how long a post is and you can get three answers, all of them arithmetically correct. The disagreement is about the unit being counted, and it only becomes visible once there is an emoji or a non-Latin script in the draft.

  • A reader counts grapheme clusters: one flag, one thumbs up with a skin tone, one accented letter, whatever number of code points went into building it.
  • Most programming languages report the length of a string in UTF-16 code units, which charges two for an ordinary emoji and four for a flag. That is where a scheduler and a composer begin to disagree.
  • Counting code points is closer and still wrong. A family emoji is a run of people joined by invisible characters, and a reader sees one picture.
  • Every page in this family segments graphemes with the browser's own segmenter, which is the unit the platforms display against and the one on your screen.
  • X then weights on top of that, charging Chinese, Japanese and Korean at two characters each while Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew count as one, so a grapheme total is a floor there rather than a promise.
  • Curly quotes, non-breaking spaces and the other things a word processor leaves behind cost exactly what their plain equivalents cost, so they are almost never the missing characters.

The mistake this whole family exists to catch

Going over the limit is not really the problem, because the composer stops you. The expensive habit is writing to the ceiling when every platform here folds a post away long before the maximum it advertises.

  • Instagram shows roughly the first 125 characters of a 2,200 character caption before the "more" link.
  • LinkedIn collapses a post at around 140 characters on mobile and 210 on desktop, out of 3,000.
  • YouTube puts about 157 characters of a 5,000 character description above the fold, and a search snippet cuts sooner than that.
  • Facebook will take 63,206 characters and hides the post behind "See more" a very long way short of it.
  • The consequence is identical everywhere: the only sentence certain to be read is the first one, and a first sentence cut mid-phrase arrives as a fragment rather than as a hook.

When counting is not the useful thing to do

Most drafts never approach their ceiling, and a number on the screen while you write is a quiet invitation to fill the field. Knowing when to close the counter is part of using it well.

  • Writing natively in the composer, you already have a count and it will not let you publish over the limit. These pages earn their place when text is moving between apps.
  • A ceiling has a way of becoming a target. A long post is not a better post, and the extra characters are usually the ones nobody reads.
  • Profile fields are the exception worth measuring properly, because you write them once and then leave them there for a year.
  • When the only way to fit is to cut the part that made the point, the format is wrong rather than the draft.
  • No counter can tell you whether the opening line earns the second one, which is the thing that actually decides whether the rest gets read.
The rest of the job

You just fixed one post. Now do the month.

The social media character counter solves one piece of one post. OctoSpark plans, writes and schedules the whole calendar across every network you use, publishes it for you, and reports what actually performed.

  • One calendar for every network
  • Schedule once, publish everywhere
  • Drafts written in your own voice
  • See what actually performed
Open the full sign-up page

No card needed. These tools stay free either way.

Frequently asked questions

How this tool works, what it cannot do, and what happens to what you put into it.

  • Which platform has the tightest character limit?

    It depends which field you mean. The shortest post ceiling in this family is Threads at 500, the shortest bio is TikTok at 80, and the shortest field of all is the X display name at 50. Facebook sits at the far end with a post ceiling of 63,206.

  • Do links, hashtags and spaces count towards the limit?

    Spaces, hashtags and mentions all count, hash and at sign included. Links are the one that varies: X runs every URL through its own shortener and charges a flat 23 characters however long it really is, while the other platforms here charge a link at its full typed length, tracking parameters and all. Attached photos and video cost nothing anywhere, and alt text is a separate field with its own budget.

  • Do these limits ever change?

    They do, and rarely with notice. X raises the post ceiling for paying accounts while leaving the timeline truncation exactly where it was, and bio and description ceilings have moved quietly before. The figures on these pages are the published maximums, so if a composer disagrees with the counter, believe the composer.

  • Can one draft go to every platform?

    Write to the tightest ceiling you are actually posting to and the rest come free: a post that fits X at 280 fits everything else in this family. What does not travel is the shape, because a caption written for a 2,200 character field tends to keep its point in the middle, and on a short surface the point has to be in the opening line.

  • Is my data private?

    Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.

  • Is this really free?

    Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.

  • Do I need an account?

    No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.

  • Can I use the output commercially?

    Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.