How long is too long?
Social media post lengths have always been a hot-button topic amongst marketing professionals.
But first thing is first, let’s understand what parameters you are working with, such as to know what the optimum social media post length is for each of your social media platforms to help attract and engage with your audience.
It can be hard to know whether you are saying too much or not enough, not to mention the frequently changing character limits. To help you get the ball rolling with your posts, we’ve come up with the following guide to help you create the perfect length for your posts on all your social media platforms.
Let’s take a look at some of the world’s most popular social media platforms and dive into each platform’s optimal social media post lengths.
Did you know that Facebook allows you to post up to 63,206 characters? That’s enough to tell an incredibly detailed story, but is that the road you should be going down?
According to BuzzSumo, the Facebook post with the highest engagement level is around 50 characters.
When it comes to Instagram, the character limit for captions is 2,200 characters. However, just because the platform allows you to use this amount of characters, it doesn’t mean you should use them.
Similar to Facebook, the most-engaging character length for an Instagram post is no more than 50 characters.
Twitter increased Tweet character counts from 140 to 280 characters within the last few years.
While we’ve seen that shorter is better on Facebook and Instagram, Twitter tends to favour slightly longer posts. Based on a report from the Chicago Tribune, if you want the best engagement on Twitter, you should be aiming for 240-259 characters.
Unlike most other social media platforms favour images and video, LinkedIn is a relatively text-heavy platform. LinkedIn even offers users the ability to publish full articles on the platform.
With the above in mind, however, the ideal length for a status update on LinkedIn is still around 100 characters. It’s important to remember that if your status exceeds 140 characters, people will need to click “See More” to read the entirety of your post.
Revolving mainly around boards and links to external sites, Pinterest is an interesting platform in terms of character limit and post length.
Did you know that Pinterest limits the number of boards a user can create to 2,000? Additionally, there are other limitations on the platform:
- Maximum number of Pinterest boards – 2,000
- Maximum number of Pins – 200,000
- Profile name – 30 characters
- Bio – 160 characters
- Username – 30 characters
- Board name – 50 characters
- Board description – 500 characters
- Pin title – 100 characters
- Pin description – 500 characters
Descriptions for your pins and your boards are limited to 500 characters, and board names have a character limit of 100 but are truncated after 17 characters. This is not dissimilar from profile names as it is shortened with an ellipsis after 20 characters.
TikTok
TikTok continues to take the world by storm. While TiTkok does have a 300-character limit for captions on the platform, it’s more important to focus on video length.
TikTok allows its users to upload videos up to 10 minutes in length. However, the ideal length for a video on TikTok is between 21 and 34 seconds. It’s important to remember that TikTok is continuing to evolve rapidly, and it’s very likely that this ideal video length will continue to evolve at a similar pace.
Snapchat
We wouldn’t worry too much about Snapchat’s text limitations for such a video-focused platform. However, it is important to note that captions added to snaps can use 80 characters.
Whilst this platform still has a significant focus on imagery, make sure not that the text is not overdone. Draw your audience in with a more concise and compelling caption paired with a captivating image.
YouTube
Being owned by Google, text is critical when it comes to YouTube. After all, YouTube is effectively a search engine nowadays.
Descriptions on YouTube are limited to 5,000 characters, including links to external websites. Keep in mind that users will need to expand the description box to read any descriptions longer than 100 characters.
Try including the following in your YouTube descriptions:
- Links to your social media accounts
- Affiliate links to products your recommend
- Links to other videos
While YouTube has recently introduced Shorts to compete with TikTok and Reels, the ideal length for videos on YouTube is still between seven to 15 minutes.
