Count characters for Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram with platform-specific limits and warnings.
How to use
Enter your social media post or message text.
Choose Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or another platform.
See how many characters remain before hitting the platform limit.
The guide
Paste a draft and this tool returns its character and word count, then compares the total against the limits for Twitter/X (280), LinkedIn posts (3,000), Facebook posts (63,206), and Instagram captions (2,200), flagging whichever platform would truncate or reject the text. The count refreshes as you type. The surprise is scale: 280 characters is only about 40-50 words of English, while LinkedIn allows roughly ten times that, so a draft sized for one feed is almost always mis-sized for the others.
A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.
Input
Publishing a weekly newsletter taught me more about writing than a decade of corporate emails. Every issue forces a decision: what does the reader actually need today, and what can wait until next week? That constraint, more than any style guide, is what keeps the essays sharp. The archive is the proof: forty issues, zero filler.
Expected output
331 characters, 56 words. Twitter/X: 331 of 280 - over the limit by 51 (warning). LinkedIn: 331 of 3,000 - fits. Facebook: 331 of 63,206 - fits. Instagram: 331 of 2,200 - fits.
The 331-character draft clears every threshold except Twitter/X's 280, so the tool marks it as fitting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram and raises a warning for X with a 51-character excess. That mismatch is the classic cross-posting failure: copy sized for longer-form feeds is routinely over X's limit.
Every character in the field counts: letters, spaces, punctuation, and line breaks all add to the total, and the count refreshes as you type. The word count is reported alongside it; the two diverge quickly because one word can hold anywhere from one to a dozen characters. Platforms enforce the character figure, never the word figure, so the character total is the one to watch.
Each platform is scored against its post limit: Twitter/X at 280 characters for standard accounts, LinkedIn feed posts at 3,000, Facebook posts at 63,206, and Instagram captions at 2,200. A draft under the limit is marked as fitting; one over it draws a warning with the excess spelled out. The thresholds apply to posts and captions, not to replies, comments, or profile fields, which carry their own separate caps.
For plain text with no links, media, or emoji, yes - all counters and composers agree on the same total, spaces and punctuation included. They diverge on URLs, which X exempts from its limit but most general counters still charge, and on emoji, where one visible character can be counted as one code point or several, depending on the counter.
No. Platforms enforce character limits, not word limits, and words vary in length: a 45-word post fits X's 280 only if the words average about six characters. Hashtags, handles, and URLs inflate the count faster than normal prose, so a draft that reads short in words can still be over the limit in characters.
The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.
Sent. Thank you.
