The intention behind the launch of social media platforms must be to let people express themselves and let them be without the necessity of having to reveal their true identity. It transformed dramatically to become the number one platform for businesses to reach and retain more customers. Just as a website was a must-have in one age for businesses, this age demands every business to be on almost all major social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. Social media popularity helps businesses transform into brands and maintain their customer base while attracting new clients.
Social media posting should be done at a regulated speed so that you remain visible to your customers, at the same time don’t leave them feeling overwhelmed with your posts. Even here, moderation is the key. Drafting a social media post, keeping the current trends in consideration, is the key to gain maximum reach and augment the revenue generated through each post.
So, what’s the secret behind an ideal social media post? One of the most important part of every social media post is the post length. It’s a crucial factor puzzling social media marketers and they end up experimenting with various posts to arrive at the right length for their post.
Cutting the long story short, here I am presenting you with the details of how much your post length should be on various social media platforms.
1. Facebook
Let’s take the most popular one first. The tricky thing with Facebook posts is if you keep your post length limited, you might get ignored whereas if you keep it a bit long you hardly get any attention as people these days have reduced attention spans. However, when it comes to Facebook posts, I would prefer them to be short rather than long. Even I tend to skip the long posts.
– Ideal length of a FB post or an update: The ideal length of a FB post can be around 40 characters. According to a study conducted by Jeff Bullas, Facebook posts with 80 characters or less are able to secure around 88% engagement. Simply put, a short and succinct post is more likely to gain wider reach due to reducing attention spans. Longer posts demand time investment, which has become the most valuable currency these days and so nobody is ready to do it.
The current post character limit is 63,206 characters and this is subject to change in future as Facebook identifies the trends and decides to change with it.
2. Twitter
Tweeting has its own limitations. It stuck to 140 character limit for a long time but increased it to 280 characters before two years.
– Ideal Length of a Winning Tweet: 71-100 characters is the perfect count if you want a tweet to gain attention and response. Anything more than 100 characters will demand the audience to spend time comprehending the tweet. Even though your tweet may have some useful information, it may lose if it is too long or more than 100 characters. It may not be possible always to limit your tweet length but keeping the ideal length in consideration can help you avoid reworks.
3. Instagram
Even on this platform, being brief is strategic. To get the highest engagement levels, you can target at 135-150 characters while using captions. Though Instagram is mainly an image and video sharing platform, using the character length that wins can help you gain an edge over your competitors.
– Ideal length of an Instagram post or an update: The maximum character limit for captions on Instagram is around 2,200 characters. If there’s no way you can reduce the caption limit or want to go for a longer caption, ensure that you make the initial part of the caption attention grabbing. This is because even though you go for a longer caption, after reaching 125 characters, the remaining ones will get truncated.
4. LinkedIn
This platform for connecting professionals also limits characters for status updates. Compared to other social media platforms, LinkedIn is quite versatile. There are a number of things you can update on it. Following are the upper limits for various updates on LinkedIn:
• Company update: 700 characters
• Company name: 100 characters
• About us/Summary: 2,000 characters
• Page name: 50 characters
• Company leaders headline: 150 characters
• Company leaders description: 150 characters
• Employee testimonials: 400 characters
• Custom module title: 150 characters
• Custom module body: 500 characters
• Custom module URL label: 70 characters
• First name: 20 character
• Last name: 40 characters
• Recommendation: 3,000 characters
• LinkedIn Publishing post headline: 150 characters
• LinkedIn Publishing content length: 120,000 characters
A consideration of these limits can help you save a great deal of time which you might otherwise spend in trimming your content.
When it comes to ideal character length for a LinkedIn status update, it can be around 50-100 characters.
5. Pinterest
When it comes to this image based social media platform, there are a number of text fields in which character limitation is imposed. Although it limits the number of boards and pins you can have under a single user name, it also limits the number of characters you can have for user name, board description, board name, Pinterest bio and profile name, etc.
– Ideal length of a Pinterest post or an update: Of extreme importance here is the Pinterest board name. You can admittedly use up to 100 characters for naming your Pinterest board but anything more than 17 characters may hide your board from the view.
Finally, I only want to say to you that all these character limits I mentioned are merely pointers towards winning and highly engaging posts. It might be possible that for your business niche longer posts providing detailed information could get you high engagements. It’s all about trying and testing and going with what works for you. One principle I follow on each of the social media platforms is moderation. Being brief in conveying your ideas can help you attract a lot of attention and improve your engagement levels.
The max character limits might undergo changes in future. However, knowing them in advance can help you draft your post, captions, and tweets considering and fitting only the main points. Knowledge about character limits helps avoid reworks.
Which character limit worked for your business niche and for which platform? Did you ever have experiences with longer posts doing very well? Share them in the comment box below
