Your Guide to the Ideal Length of Social Media Posts
Marketers always crave more likes, comments, shares, and views. It is an integral way to judge social media engagement viably. You can effectively nail any social media strategy just by knowing the perfect social media post length.
Are you trying to figure out the right way to craft the perfect Tweet? Are you always unsure of how many hashtags should we use to improve the post’s engagement on Instagram? What is Digital Presence? Confused about the number of characters you need to add in a Facebook Ad headline! Questions like these constantly trouble social media marketers on a daily basis. The main motive of marketers is to find and share the best possible content.
Like every other trend on social media, the social media character limits are also changing constantly, so it becomes very difficult to keep up with the change. At the same time, when you know the ideal length of a Facebook post, Instagram caption, and Tweet, it improves the probability of the people reading or engaging with the content.
We are providing a complete guide to the character limits for all the major social media sites to make your task a little bit easier. In this article, we have curated research for ideal character counts (not character limits) for content on each platform
Length of Facebook Post
Most social media marketers consider Facebook as the premier network for major marketing online. It has over a billion user counts that makes it the biggest social network available on the web.
Marketers use Facebook for targeting anyone from any city, any country, or worldwide. But every tactic will be in vain if your posts and Facebook ads are not well-versed.
The Facebook posts could be up to 63,206 characters long according to 2020 guidelines. Nobody is penalized for using ample images, or videos either, you have tons of opportunities to play around it.
Facebook allows you to use different varieties of posts to be uploaded. For instance, basic Facebook statuses, event posts, ads, etc. The list goes on and on.
But in reality, even you know that it is not likely for people to read posts with 63,206 characters in length. People usually just quickly glance over their mobile screens and read the posts. Keep your posts crisp, sweet and simple.
According to the general census, is that your Facebook posts have to be around 40 to 50 characters. According to Facebook expert Jeff Bullas and marketing company, observed that for Facebook posts 40 characters is the sweet spot.
Length of Tweets on Twitter
Twitter is consistently changing its norms regarding the character counts and enhancing other features as well. They are rebounding the rights with their past wrongs and by making huge improvements in their features.
With each passing day, Twitter is becoming more and more important for marketers. Assurance of both good quality content along with proper character length, so it’s short and crisp enough to enhance engagement.
Till 2017, the limit of Twitter’s post was an iconic 140 characters. But Twitter upped its character limit to about 280 characters for all the Tweets.
It has no restriction on visual media like an image, gif, or video. So, you can freely write great captions for the visual media. Unlike @ mentions or images, links also take up some of your word counts, which gets shortened after 23 characters.
Twitter DMs (direct messages) can go up to 10,000 characters long. But it is not much of a concern, as Twitter DMs are equivalent to private messages.
According to Buddy Media’s data, your tweets should be between 71 and 100 characters to attain maximum engagement as compared to longer posts. Such tweets are 17% more likely to get retweeted or otherwise be engaged with. Always try to keep your tweets short and concise like Facebook.
Length of Instagram Captions
Instagram is completely media-centric. Although it is a graphic-centric platform where video and images take the center stage on the platform, you still have to add captions to your media. They are required to achieve optimal engagement and make your message reach across the platform.
Instagram allows adding caption up to 2,200 characters long and 30 hashtags in the whole post, including the hashtags added to the comments.
But what is the desired caption length so people’s engagement can be improved. It’s pretty obvious that people won’t read a caption as long as 2,200 characters. They will also be required to click on the ‘see more’ button. This is quite unlikely to happen considering majorly the mobile-only network users.
Keeping that in mind, your Instagram captions must also be short and sweet. The recommendation of the Instagram team is to keep your captions under 125 characters. Though your caption is important, you must focus on the visuals more for Instagram.
Post Length for LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a unique social media platform. Its primary user base is the professional workforce. The posts on LinkedIn are majorly business-oriented. It allows you to post statuses, videos with captions, and blog posts on the platform.
The statuses and blog posts have different character limits. Let us have a look at both of them precisely.
LinkedIn status: It can be up to 700 characters long on any company page posts, and 1,300 characters for individual accounts. The best part is the articles have no real character limit. Moreover, some reports suggest that posts over 120,000 characters get cut off by LinkedIn’s blogging network.
LinkedIn cuts off your posts with a ‘See more’ button at the 140-character mark. Any character beyond this will remain hidden—on both desktop or mobile devices.
So, it is recommended to write 140 characters for both personal and company posts on LinkedIn. This makes sure that your readers are able to view all of your content without interruptions while scrolling through their feed.
The LinkedIn article side treat articles as a blog post that make your articles long enough to get recognized as a blog to put your point across, but short enough to enhance audience engagement.
Length of YouTube Video and Description
YouTube is also considered a social network. It is the third-largest search engine in the world (after Google Search and Google Images), due to which you can’t ignore YouTube as a platform and the relevance of your posting schedule.
If you want to share a video post on social media, it is recommended to follow the length guidelines for the network. To share a YouTube video on Twitter, for instance, you still need to stay under the designated character limit.
There is no hard and fast rule for video length on YouTube. To naturally improve the YouTube watch time, keep the video length specified so as to deliver the information without making it boring. Though our recommendation is to keep your videos three minutes long.
Moreover, the video title and description are crucial for the SEO rankings.
YouTube guidelines:
- Title – 100 characters (pro-tip: try to keep it under 70 characters)
- Description – 5,000 characters
How long your video titles and descriptions should be
Try to incorporate relevant keywords in the video titles and descriptions.
Beware: Anything beyond 70 characters is likely to get cut off in the search results.
Length of Google My Business Post
It is most important for local businesses. Google My Business has matured enough to be recognized as a social network that links to your company’s Google Search and Google Maps listing. This is essential for brick-and-mortar stores when you want people to come and visit physically.
Google My Business enhanced its character limit from 300 to 1,500 characters in 2018. While Google has removed its 100-character limit from updates, so keep your posts as short as you like.
Titles must be 58 characters long and should be crisp enough to describe what you’re advertising. And try to deliver the core message in 4-5 words.
Avoid click-baiting here at any cost. Always keep your Google My Business posts as short as possible. Our recommendation is to try putting your entire point across in the very first sentence of your Google My Business post itself.
Conclusion
According to Google, the ideal post length is between 150-300 characters. It should be brief and crisp enough to read, but long enough so as to offer relevant information. Some Digital Marketing Company in Gurugram can help you in planning your social media efforts.
I hope with this article, you have learned how long your social media posts can be and how long it ideally should be on the major social networks. Using these tips you can make sure that your brand’s social media posts are more engaging.
