Character Limits for Social Posts, SMS and SEO Titles
X allows 280 characters, Instagram captions 2,200 and LinkedIn posts 3,000. An SMS holds 160 plain Latin characters, but only 70 once it contains Arabic, emoji or other special characters. Search results show about 50–60 characters of a title.
Character limits at a glance
Platforms limit posts by characters, not words. These are the maximums at the time of writing, from the platforms' published limits as collected by Hootsuite. Many feeds cut text off with "…more" well before the maximum, so the first line or two matter most.
| Where | Maximum characters |
|---|---|
| X (Twitter) post, standard account | 280 |
| Threads post | 500 |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 |
| Facebook post | 63,206 |
| Pinterest pin description | 500 |
| YouTube video title | 100 |
| YouTube description | 5,000 |
| SMS, plain Latin text | 160 per message |
| SMS with Arabic, emoji or other non-Latin characters | 70 per message |
| Page title in Google results | no hard limit; about 50–60 are shown |
| Meta description in Google results | no hard limit; about 150–160 are shown |
Why SMS drops from 160 to 70 characters
An SMS carries 140 bytes of data. Plain English text uses a 7-bit alphabet called GSM-7, so 140 bytes hold 160 characters. As soon as a message contains a character outside that alphabet, such as Arabic letters, Chinese, most emoji, or even a curly quotation mark pasted from a word processor, the whole message switches to UCS-2, which uses 2 bytes per character. Then 140 bytes hold only 70 characters.
Longer messages are split into parts, and each part loses a few characters to a header that tells the phone how to join them: 153 characters per part in GSM-7, 67 in UCS-2. A 200-character English message is 2 parts; the same length in Arabic is 3. If you send bulk SMS and pay per part, one emoji can double or triple the cost.
Characters, bytes and emoji
"Character" sounds simple, but a computer can count the same text in several ways. The Character Counter shows both the visible character count and the size in UTF-8 bytes. Here's how common text compares:
| Text | Visible characters | Unicode code points | UTF-8 bytes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hello | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| café | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| مرحبا (Arabic, "hello") | 5 | 5 | 10 |
| 😀 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| 👍🏽 (thumbs up with skin tone) | 1 | 2 | 8 |
| 👨👩👧 (family) | 1 | 5 | 18 |
Platforms don't all count the same way. Some count visible characters, some count code points, and X counts most emoji as 2. If you're close to a limit with emoji or non-Latin text, leave a margin or test in the platform's own editor.
Bytes matter for databases, form fields with byte limits and some APIs: Arabic text takes about twice as many bytes as characters, and emoji take four or more.
Titles and descriptions for search results
Google doesn't set a character limit for page titles or meta descriptions; it cuts them to fit the width of the results page, which works out to roughly 50–60 characters for a title and 150–160 for a description on desktop. Wide letters (W, M) use more space than narrow ones (i, l). To avoid a cut-off:
- Put the main topic in the first 50 characters of the title.
- Make the description a complete sentence of about 140–155 characters.
- Don't rely on the end of either being visible.
Google may also rewrite titles and descriptions it considers unhelpful, so write them for people, not for a counter.
Using the Character Counter with a limit
- Paste or type your text in the Character Counter.
- Enter your limit (for example 280 or 160).
- Watch Remaining as you edit. It also shows characters without spaces, words, lines and UTF-8 bytes.
Your text is counted in your browser and not sent anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes, on almost every platform and in SMS. The Character Counter shows counts with and without spaces.
Why does my SMS show as 2 messages when it's under 160 characters?
It probably contains a character outside the GSM-7 alphabet, such as an emoji or a curly apostrophe, which lowers the limit to 70 per part.
Do links count toward the X character limit?
X shortens links and counts each as 23 characters, whatever its real length.
How long should a meta description be?
About 140–155 characters is a safe target so the full sentence is likely to show.