Check your caption against every platform's limit

Why the same caption gets different counts

Platforms don't all count characters the same way, which is why a caption that fits in one app can be rejected by another:

• Most platforms (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Threads, Facebook, Pinterest) count the way computers store text, in UTF-16 units. Ordinary letters count as one, but most emoji, and the “bold” or “italic” Unicode letters some caption generators produce, count as two.
• X uses weighted counting. Any link counts as 23 characters however long it is, each emoji counts as two, and so do characters outside the common Latin ranges, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. That's why an all-Japanese post fills up at about 140 characters.
• Bluesky counts what you see: one emoji is one character, even if it's built from several code points. Long links are shortened in the post to the domain plus a few characters, so they cost less than their full length.

The Characters total at the top counts what a person would see. Each platform card shows that platform's own count, so trust the card when you're close to a limit.

Limits at a glance (as of 2026)

• X: 280 per post (Premium accounts: up to 25,000)
• Threads: 500, plus an optional text attachment of up to 10,000
• Bluesky: 300
• Instagram caption: 2,200, with at most 5 hashtags
• TikTok caption: 4,000 in the app (2,200 when posted through a scheduling tool)
• YouTube: 100 for titles, 5,000 for descriptions
• LinkedIn post: 3,000
• Facebook post: 63,206
• Pinterest: 100 for pin titles, 500 for descriptions

Platforms adjust these from time to time: Instagram cut its hashtag allowance from 30 to 5 at the end of 2025, so treat the limits as a guide and check the app when something looks off.

Write for the part people actually see

The full limit matters less than the first line. Feeds collapse long text behind a “more” link: roughly the first 125 characters of an Instagram caption, around 210 of a LinkedIn post on desktop, and only about 70 characters of a YouTube title in search results. Each card with a fold shows a preview of what makes it above the cut, so you can check that the hook and the key words land early.

A few more checks run in the background: YouTube rejects titles and descriptions containing < or >, and ignores every hashtag on a video if there are more than 15. Instagram won't post a caption with more than 5 hashtags.

Publishing a video? Plan its chapters with the YouTube chapter maker, check how your thumbnail reads with the thumbnail preview, and size images for each network with the social image resizer.