LinkedIn allows 3,000 characters and hides everything after about 210 behind a "see more" link. The number that shapes your writing is the second one. Every platform has this pair, and the gap between them is where most social copy goes wrong.
Hard Limits and Visible Limits
Truncation points are approximate and shift with device, font size and whether the post carries media. Verified against current platform behaviour.
| Platform | Hard limit | Visible before truncation | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| X | 280 | 280 | Premium accounts can post up to 25,000 |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | ~125 | Hashtags count toward the total |
| Facebook post | 63,206 | ~477 | Long posts collapse; short ones show fully |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 | ~210 | The first two lines decide whether anyone expands |
| TikTok caption | 4,000 | ~100 | Raised from 2,200; overlaid on the video, so keep it very short |
| YouTube description | 5,000 | ~157 | Only the first lines appear under the title |
| YouTube title | 100 | ~70 | Rejected above 100, truncated in listings |
| Pinterest description | 500 | ~50 | Rarely shown in the feed at all |
| Threads | 500 | ~250 | Longer posts collapse behind an expander |
| Bluesky | 300 | 300 | Counted as graphemes; links count their full length |
| Mastodon | 500 | 500 | Instances can raise it; links always count as 23 |
The First Line Is the Whole Job
On every platform in that table, the visible portion has one purpose: earn the expansion. Nothing after the cut is read by anyone who was not already interested.
This changes how the opening should be written. A post that starts by setting context, "Last week I attended a conference in Berlin where several people asked me about...", has spent its entire visible budget before saying anything. The same post starting with the finding, then the context, gets expanded far more often.
Three openings that consistently work: a specific number, a claim someone might disagree with, or an incomplete statement that needs the rest of the sentence to resolve. What does not work is a greeting, a preamble about how excited you are, or a restatement of the headline.
The practical test: read only the first 100 characters of your draft. If someone would not click to see the rest, rewrite the opening rather than the body.
Compose on the device people will read on
Truncation points are measured in rendered lines, not characters, so a caption that fits on a desktop preview can collapse a line earlier on a narrow phone. If most of your audience is mobile, check the draft on a phone before publishing rather than trusting the character count alone.
Why Cross-Posting the Same Text Fails
Publishing identical copy everywhere is efficient and reliably underperforms, for reasons that are structural rather than about tone.
A post written for X at 280 characters is far too short for LinkedIn, where it reads as thin and gets no expansion prompt. The same post written for LinkedIn at 1,500 characters cannot exist on X at all. Instagram needs the payload in the first 125 characters because the rest is hidden; LinkedIn needs a hook in the first 210 and can then run long.
Link handling differs too. LinkedIn has historically reduced the reach of posts containing external links, which is why so many creators put the link in a comment. X counts every link as 23 characters. Instagram makes links in captions unclickable entirely, so "link in bio" exists as a workaround for a platform limitation rather than a stylistic choice.
The efficient compromise is to write the argument once, then produce a short version and a long version, and adjust where the link goes per platform. That is three variants rather than nine, and it respects the actual constraints.
Check your post against every limit
Ten platforms at once, from Bluesky's 300 to Facebook's 63,206.
These Numbers Move
Character limits are product decisions and they change without announcement. X doubled from 140 to 280 in 2017 and later raised it to 25,000 for paying accounts. Threads launched at 500 and has been tested at higher values. Instagram has adjusted how many hashtags it will act on more than once.
Two habits protect you from that churn. First, write comfortably inside the limit rather than up against it, so a change in either direction does not break anything you have already published. Second, treat any published table of limits, including the one above, as accurate at the time of writing rather than authoritative forever.
What has stayed stable is the underlying shape: a generous hard limit, a much shorter visible window, and a strong bias toward posts that make their point immediately. Optimising for the visible window rather than the cap will keep working regardless of what the numbers do next.
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