Social Media Character Counter
Write once, check your character count against every major platform at the same time.
How it works
Write your post once
Type or paste the copy you're planning to publish.
Watch every platform at once
Each card updates live, showing exactly how many characters you have left — or how many you're over.
Trim and copy
Adjust until it fits where you need it to, then copy the final text.
What people use this counter for
One draft, checked everywhere it needs to work.
One post, many platforms
Paid ad copy
Avoiding "see more" cutoffs
Multichannel content planning
Tight headline limits
A few things worth knowing about platform limits
Every platform sets its character limit around its own format, not a shared standard, which is exactly why the same 300-character post can be perfectly fine on LinkedIn and already too long for X. A caption under a photo, a professional feed update, and a 280-character microblog post are different kinds of content even when they're carrying the same message, so the limits attached to each reflect how that platform expects people to read it.
What happens when you go over varies by platform and by field. Some organic posts just get truncated behind a "see more" link, which is a soft failure — mildly annoying, not catastrophic. Others, especially form fields with a hard cap, simply won't accept another character. Paid advertising is the strictest case: platforms like Meta and Google enforce their limits (like Google's 30-character responsive search ad headlines) because ads run across thousands of placements and devices that all need to render predictably, so oversized ad text is typically rejected outright rather than quietly cut.
That gap between organic and paid limits is worth remembering specifically because it's easy to write copy that works fine as a Facebook or LinkedIn post and then discover it's nowhere close to fitting a Google headline or a Meta ad's primary text field. Checking every relevant limit at once — before you're mid-upload in an ads dashboard — is the whole point of seeing all these platforms side by side instead of pasting the same draft into one tool at a time.
Frequently asked questions
Why does every platform have a different character limit?
Each platform sets its limit based on its own format and how it displays content — a headline field, a caption under a photo, a professional feed post — so there's no single standard. That's exactly why checking a piece of text against several limits at once is useful when the same copy needs to work in more than one place.
What actually happens if I go over a platform's limit?
It depends on the platform and the field. Some organic posts simply get truncated with a "see more" link, some fields refuse to publish at all, and paid ad platforms like Meta and Google will typically reject the text outright or cut it in previews — which is why checking before you submit an ad matters more than for a casual post.
Why are paid ad limits often stricter than organic post limits?
Ad placements are built around tight, consistent layouts across thousands of ad units and devices, so platforms enforce short, hard limits (like Google's 30-character RSA headlines) to keep every ad rendering predictably. Organic posts have more layout flexibility, so their limits tend to be looser.
Does this tool count characters the same way each platform does?
It counts raw characters, including spaces and punctuation, against each platform's published limit. Some platforms apply extra rules for things like links or emoji (X/Twitter, for example, counts some URLs as a fixed length regardless of how long they actually are) — for anything link-heavy, treat the count here as a close estimate and double-check inside the platform itself.
Can I use this to plan one post for multiple platforms?
Yes — that's the main use case. Write your draft once, watch which platform cards go into the red, and trim until everything fits (or accept that a couple of platforms will need a shortened version).
Is this character counter free to use?
Yes, completely free, with no account or sign-up, and it runs entirely in your browser.