Social Media Character Counter

What the tool does

The same text is counted differently on every platform. X counts links at a fixed length and emoji as two characters, YouTube and TikTok use other units, and search results have truncation risk instead of a hard limit. The tool reads your text once and lists the count, the limit and the remaining or excess amount for nine profiles.

Three raw measures are shown as well: user-perceived characters (graphemes), Unicode code points and UTF-16 code units. Links detected for X are listed, and hashtags and mentions are checked against the Instagram caption rules.

How to use

1. Type or paste the text. Counts refresh shortly after you stop typing; up to 100,000 characters are processed.
2. Pick the main profile. The meter at the top shows its count, limit and remaining characters.
3. Compare the other platforms in the table. Rows over the limit are labelled “over”, so colour is not the only signal.
4. Copy the summary, download the details as JSON, or add the text to a share link if you want to.

To see how a meta title and description might be cut in search results pixel by pixel, use the SERP preview tool; for word counts and reading time on longer text, use the word counter.

X weighted counting

X publishes its rules in the counting characters documentation and in the version 3 configuration of the open-source twitter-text project. The tool runs the X count through that project’s official JavaScript library, served with the site as a pinned copy:

• Text is normalised to NFC first, so I plus a combining dot becomes a single İ.
• Code points in 0–4351, 8192–8205, 8208–8223 and 8242–8247 count 1; everything else counts 2. Turkish and other Latin letters count 1, Chinese and Japanese characters count 2.
• Emoji sequences are recognised by the library’s emoji parser; each sequence counts 2, including skin tones and zero-width joiners.
• Links are detected with the library’s top-level domain list and count 23 regardless of length; example.museum counts 23 too. The standard post limit is 280; Premium long posts are outside this profile.

URL and emoji examples

The built-in example post has 175 graphemes and 176 UTF-16 units. Its 45-character blog link counts 23 on X and the rocket emoji counts 2, so the X result is 154 with 126 characters left. The same text uses 176 units on LinkedIn, far below 3,000, but it exceeds the 160-character meta description guideline.

Addresses without a scheme (example.com, example.museum) are detected with the library’s domain list, and e-mail addresses are never counted as links. For domains added after the library version or for newer emoji sequences, X’s own count may differ.

Platform limits and recommendations

Where a platform does not document its counting unit, UTF-16 code units are used; they are never fewer than the visible characters, so the estimate errs on the safe side. TikTok’s 2,200 is the UTF-16 limit of its Content Posting API; the in-app editor may show a different limit. Google sets no fixed character limit for titles or descriptions, so 60 and 160 are editorial guidelines.

Limits and privacy

• The tool does not guarantee that a platform will accept a post or that every account type has the same limit. Treat the platform’s own editor as final before publishing.
• Platforms change their rules; every profile shows its source link and the date it was last checked.
• Text is processed in your browser, never sent to a server and never written to storage. It only becomes part of a link if you choose to include it when sharing.