Social media character counter

How to use it

1. Paste your caption. Write it for the platform with the most room, usually Instagram or LinkedIn.
2. Read the seven rows. Each row counts the text the way that app does and shows what’s left. Red means it won’t post.
3. Fix the red rows. Shorten by hand, or let the caption fitter make a version for each platform.

If you post to YouTube, type the title in its own box: it has a separate 100-character limit.

Worked examples

1. A long link. “New video on why I stopped posting at 9 am: https://www.example.com/blog/2026/10/why-i-stopped-posting-at-nine-in-the-morning” is 125 characters. Instagram counts all 125. X counts it as 67, because X shortens every link to 23 characters however long it is.

2. Japanese and emoji. “新しい動画です 🎬🔥” looks like 10 characters (counting the space). X counts it as 19: each Japanese character and each emoji counts 2. Threads counts it as 16, because Threads counts each emoji by its byte length (4 for most). YouTube’s description limit is in bytes, so it uses 30 of the 5,000.

3. A normal caption. A 300-character caption fits Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Threads. On X it counts 300 of 280, so it is 20 too long. That is where most cross-posting goes wrong.

The limits, platform by platform

Every number links to the platform’s own page. Where a platform doesn’t publish a number, the table says so instead of guessing.

When a platform doesn’t say how it counts, the counter uses the stricter way (UTF-16 code units, where most emoji count as 2). That way a caption that fits here also fits there. Octoque’s own composer uses the same limits.

How X counts characters

X counts in weighted characters, using its open-source twitter-text rules. Text is normalised first (so “é” typed two ways counts the same). Then:

• Latin letters, numbers, spaces and most punctuation count 1.
• Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, and most other scripts, count 2.
• Every emoji counts 2, even ones built from several pieces like a family or a flag.
• Every link counts 23, short or long.

The limit is 280 weighted characters for accounts without Premium. Premium accounts can post longer, but most people reading on phones still see the first few lines.

What people see before “more”

Long captions are cut off in the feed with a “more” link. No platform publishes the exact point, and it moves with screen size and line breaks. Commonly cited figures are about 125 characters on Instagram and about 140 on LinkedIn on a phone. The counter shows you that much, so you can check your first line works on its own.