About Social Media Character Counter
“Character count” means different things on different platforms, and the differences are large enough to lose you a post. X does not count characters at all — it counts weighted units. Most Latin text weighs 1, but Japanese, Chinese, Korean, emoji and many symbols weigh 2. A Japanese user shown a plain character count is being told they have twice the room they actually have.
X also replaces every URL with a flat cost of 23 units no matter how long the link really is. A 200-character tracking URL costs the same as a 20-character one, so a post that a naive counter calls hopelessly over the limit often fits comfortably. Both rules are implemented here.
Everywhere else, the count that matches what a person means is graphemes, not code units. A family emoji is several codepoints and one visible character — `"👨👩👧".length` returns 8. Counting graphemes gives 1, which is what the platform and the reader both see.
The other number worth knowing is where a platform visually collapses your text. Instagram cuts the feed preview at roughly 125 characters, LinkedIn at about 210, YouTube descriptions at 157. Those points decide whether anyone reads the rest, and they arrive long before the hard limit.
How to check your post length
Choose the platform
Each has its own counting rules and its own set of fields — post, bio, title and so on.
Paste or type your text
The counter updates live, showing what the platform counts alongside the plain character count.
Watch the truncation marker
Where a platform collapses text early, the cut-off point is shown so you can front-load what matters.
Why the numbers differ
- X: weighted units. Latin 1, CJK and emoji 2, any URL a flat 23.
- Bluesky: graphemes, so a multi-codepoint emoji costs one.
- Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook: straightforward character counts, but each collapses the display far earlier than the limit.
- YouTube titles: 100 is the hard limit, but search results cut around 60 — the practical limit is the smaller one.