The Best Length for Social Media Posts: A Guide for Every Platform

Are you writing too much in your social media posts? Too little? Are you wondering, what is “quality content” in terms of length? Here are the things you need to know before posting your content.

Several studies have found that Facebook statuses of around 40-80 characters perform best. An Express Writers infographic suggests that your posts work best at 40 characters or fewer, earning 86% more engagement than longer posts. The next best length of a Facebook post, which receives 66% more engagement than longer posts, is 80 characters or fewer.

Twitter’s famous 140 character-long limit doubled in 2017, to the applause of many. The reason given for the increase to 280 characters was not clearly outlined by the social platform, although the original limit was modelled after the average character count limit of a text message. Tweets that are 100 characters or shorter enjoy 17% more engagement than longer tweets.

LinkedIn technically limits posts to 700 characters. LinkedIn is a relatively text-heavy platform. LinkedIn even offers users the ability to publish full articles on the platform. With the above in mind, however, the ideal length for a status update on LinkedIn is still around 100 characters. It’s important to remember that if your status exceeds 140 characters, people will need to click “See More” to read the entirety of your post.

Instagram photo or video captions can be up to 2,200 characters long with a maximum of 30 hashtags. Truncation occurs at 125 characters, which is where the social platform sets its cut-off for ads and promotional entries. Instagram is unusual in that outside research recommends a longer post length than the platform. In fact, Sprout Social found that Instagram posts between 138-150 characters received the highest levels of engagement.

Revolving mainly around boards and links to external sites, Pinterest is an interesting platform in terms of character limit and post length. Did you know that Pinterest limits the number of boards a user can create to 2,000? Additionally, there are other limitations on the platform. While Pinterest has a pretty lenient allowance on descriptions, only the first 50 characters will show up when people initially click on your board or Pin.TikTok video descriptions has a 2,200 character limit. TikTok tells users that adding longer descriptions makes them more likely to show in people’s “For You” pages. As we know in digital marketing, there’s value in longer captions for optimizing SEO. For more info on how to create appealing social media content, please contact us!

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