Social Media Character Limits

Spaces, line breaks, hashtags and mentions all count. X Premium subscribers can post up to 25,000 characters, but the timeline still cuts long posts short. Threads posts stop at 500, but you can attach up to 10,000 characters of text to one.

Profile fields are much shorter than posts. A LinkedIn headline takes 220 characters. Many platforms don't publish these limits; figures marked “reported” are what the apps enforce in testing and what most guides agree on.

In December 2025 Instagram announced it would cut the limit from 30 to 5 hashtags per post or Reel, rolling it out gradually. Meta's developer documentation still says 30; keep to 5. YouTube ignores every hashtag on a video with more than 60, and shows up to 3 by the title.

Threads allows one topic tag per post, up to 50 characters. Bluesky has no set number of hashtags in the text, plus up to 8 extra tags of up to 64 characters each.

Few people tap “more”. On Instagram only about the first 125 characters of a caption show in the feed, and on LinkedIn about 210 before “see more”, fewer on a phone. Everything after that is read only by people who were already interested.

So put the point of the post in the first line, and push hashtags and links to the end. YouTube titles are cut off in search at about 60–70 characters, though the limit is 100; put the words people search for first.

Apps don't count text the same way. X counts every emoji as 2, Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters as 2, and every link as 23 however long it is. Hindi and other Indian scripts count 1 per character on X. Bluesky and Mastodon count what you see, so any emoji is 1. Most other apps don't say how they count. Our counter counts Unicode characters for them, where an emoji with a skin tone counts 2 and a family emoji 5, so leave a margin.

Fancy fonts are not fonts: each letter is a separate maths symbol, so 𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱 counts double on X. Screen readers may read them out letter by letter or skip them, and search doesn't match them, so keep them out of names and keywords.

Without Premium, a post on X stops at 280. A thread of numbered posts is the usual way round it, on Threads (500), Bluesky (300) and Mastodon (500) too. Break at the end of a sentence, and make the first post work on its own: it is the only one most people see.