Character Counter
Character count with Twitter, LinkedIn and SMS platform limits
Platform limits
About this tool
This free character counter counts every character in your text — with spaces, without spaces, and as UTF-8 bytes. It also shows at-a-glance progress bars for the most important platform character limits: Twitter/X (280), SMS (160 per segment), LinkedIn posts (3,000), Instagram captions (2,200), Facebook posts (63,206), Google SEO title (60 chars) and meta description (160 chars), and YouTube title (100) and description (5,000).
Platform limits explained: Twitter counts every character including spaces and punctuation. URLs in tweets are shortened to 23 characters regardless of actual length. SMS messages use 160 characters per segment with GSM-7 encoding; using emoji or non-GSM characters drops this to 70 characters per segment (Unicode UCS-2 encoding). LinkedIn posts can be up to 3,000 characters but are truncated with a "see more" link after about 210 characters in the feed.
For SEO copywriting, Google typically displays 50–60 characters in desktop search result titles and 120–160 characters in meta descriptions (these are approximate — Google measures in pixels, not characters, so wider letters like 'W' count for more than narrow ones like 'i'). Keeping titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 155 characters is the standard guidance.
UTF-8 byte count differs from character count when your text includes emoji or non-ASCII characters. An emoji typically takes 4 bytes; an accented character like é takes 2 bytes; a standard ASCII character takes 1 byte. Databases and APIs that store text often have byte-based limits rather than character-based limits, making byte count the relevant metric for developers.