Social Media Character Counter

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text. Counts update as you type.
2. Check the bars: green is within the limit, amber is within 10% of it, red is over.
3. For YouTube tags, use the separate tags box, because YouTube counts tags differently.

Character limits by platform

Each limit links to the platform's own documentation. We list a limit only after confirming it there.

Why counts differ between platforms

“Character” doesn't mean the same thing everywhere, and emoji are where most surprises happen.

• X gives each emoji and each Chinese, Japanese or Korean character a weight of 2, and every link counts as 23 no matter how long it is.
• Threads counts an emoji by its size in bytes, so a single emoji can use 4 or more of the 500.
• YouTube descriptions are limited to 5,000 bytes. Plain English letters are 1 byte each, but accented letters take 2 and most emoji 4.
• YouTube titles and Instagram captions are counted cautiously here: emoji count as 2, which may be slightly stricter than the platform.

The headline “Characters” number counts what you see: 👍🏽 is one character even though it's built from two code points.

Writing tips that fit the limits

• Put the most important words first. YouTube notes that viewers may only see part of a long title.
• Instagram now allows up to 5 hashtags per post, so choose a few specific tags rather than a long list.
• On X, a link always costs 23 characters, so shortening it yourself doesn't save space.

Worked examples

• Emojis in an X post. X counts most emojis as two characters, so a 270-character draft with five emojis can go over the 280 limit. The counter uses X's weighting so you see the real total.
• YouTube descriptions in bytes. The 5,000 limit is in bytes. English letters use one byte each, but an emoji can use four, and many non-Latin scripts use two or three. A 2,000-character description in Bengali or Hindi can exceed the limit.
• YouTube tags. The 500-character total includes commas, and a tag containing a space costs two extra characters for the quotation marks YouTube adds. Use the tag generator to build a list that fits.

Visible vs maximum length

The maximum isn't the same as what people see. Long captions and titles get cut off with “more”, so put the important words first. For YouTube titles, the title checker flags words that fall past the point where titles are usually truncated. Our titles and tags guide covers what to write in each field.

Frequently asked questions