Character Count Guide for Blog Posts, Facebook Pages & More
Character counts for posts on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram
One of the most common questions I get from affiliates is: How long should my blog post be? I thought it would be helpful to expand the discussion to include the numbers for character limits and ideal character counts for the popular social media outlets in this post.
Blog Posts
- Ideal Headline Length: 8–12 words & under 70 characters.
If you want your post to rank well in search you should keep the title under 70 characters so it doesn’t get cut off in search engine results. You should also put keywords near the beginning of the title. This makes it more attractive in search results.
If you are trying to optimize your blog post’s title for Twitter, it should not exceed 116 characters – (That’s the 140-character limit on Twitter, minus the 23 characters a URL takes up in a tweet, minus one for the space between the title and the link.) - Ideal Blog Post Length: 1,600 words or 7 minutes to read.
According to the experts at Hubspot, your blog post should be “As long as it needs to be”. However, the post length that captures the most attention on average were posts that took seven minutes to read, which works out to be about 1,600 words. You should test out blog post length to see what works best for your audience. - Ideal Title Tag Length: 70 characters or fewer.
- A title tag is the HTML title element that’s used to describe the topic of a webpage. They are often used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page, and are important both for SEO and social sharing.
Title Tag
A title tag should be about 70 characters or fewer in length so it doesn’t get cut off in a Google Search Engine Results Page. Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag, or as many characters as will fit into a 512-pixel display.
- Ideal Meta Description Length: 155 characters or fewer.
A meta description is an HTML and XHTML element that describes your page to search engines. It’s the short description you see on a SERP to “preview” what the page is about.
Meta Description
Search engines generally truncate snippets longer than 155 characters. It is best to keep meta descriptions between 150 and 160 characters.
- Maximum length of a status update: 63,206 characters. Here’s why 🙂
- Ideal length of a status update: 40 characters. Maximum engagement happens at 40 characters. Engagement slowly diminish the longer you go.
- Ideal length of a video: 30–45 seconds long. Best practices for sharing videos on Facebook or other social media sites are to keep it short: Just enough time to intrigue users, but without forcing users to leave their environment.
Remember, all Facebook videos start without sound, therefore users have to make a conscious decision to un-mute the video. Make Facebook videos compelling enough to tempt users to stop and watch.
3) Twitter
- Tweet: Maximum length of a Tweet is 140 characters
- Comment with a Retweet: 116 characters max. When you use Twitter’s “Retweet with Comment” feature, the retweet takes up 24 characters, leaving you with 116 characters for your comment.
Retweet with comment
- Link in a Tweet: A link in your tweet takes up 24 characters (leaving 116). Did you know that Tweets with links account for 92% of all user interaction on Twitter? Whenever possible, include a link in your Tweet. This is a great way to get traffic to your content.
- Image/GIF/Video in a Tweet: Takes up 25 characters (leaving 115). Using media in your tweet is a great way to grab attention. Tweets with images or video increases click through rates by as much as 18%.
- Link + Image/GIF/Video in a tweet: If you include a link plus media in your tweet, it will take up 47 characters (leaving 93).
- Ideal Tweet Length: 100 characters without a link; 120 characters with a link. Leave some room so that people can include a short comment if they choose to manually retweet you.
- Ideal Hashtag Length: Under 11 characters; shorter if you can. Technically, hashtags can be up to 140 characters long – but that would be difficult to read.
- Video Duration in a Tweet: Up to 30 seconds long. This applies to videos that are imported or those recorded with your twitter app.
4) LinkedIn
- Professional Headline: 120 characters max.
Professional Headline
- Linkedin Summary: Maximum length 2,000 characters max.
- LinkedIn Position Title: Maximum length 100 characters.
- LinkedIn Position Description: Between 200–2,000 characters.
- Maximum length of Status Update: 600 characters.
5) Instagram
- Profile Bio: Maximum Length of an Instagram Profile Bio is 150 characters..
- Image Caption: You image caption can be up to 2,200 characters, but it cuts off in users’ feeds after 3 lines of text. Therefore it’s best to place your captions with the important content or calls-to-action towards the front of your post. Place hashtags, @mentions, and other information at the end.
Over to you…Include your tips in the comments below.