Character Limits by Platform — Twitter, Instagram, SMS, and More
Last updated: April 2026
Character limits vary widely across platforms and are not always intuitive. Korean and other multi-byte languages often count characters differently from ASCII text. Here is a complete reference.
Platform Character Limits
| Platform | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Twitter / X | 280 | Korean counts as 1 char (same as English) |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | Only first ~125 chars show without "more" |
| Instagram bio | 150 | — |
| SMS (English) | 160 | GSM-7 encoding; 153 per segment if multi-part |
| SMS (Korean) | ~70 | UCS-2 encoding; varies by carrier |
| YouTube title | 100 | First 70 shown in search results |
| YouTube description | 5,000 | First ~157 chars appear in search snippet |
| Facebook post | 63,206 | Truncated after 400 chars without expanding |
| Meta title (SEO) | ~60 chars | Google shows ~600 px width |
| Meta description (SEO) | ~155 chars | — |
Characters vs. Bytes — What's the Difference?
Character count and byte count are not always the same. In UTF-8 encoding:
- English letters, numbers, and common punctuation = 1 byte each
- Korean, Chinese, Japanese characters = 3 bytes each
- Emoji = 4 bytes each
If a database column is VARCHAR(255), that is 255 bytes — which fits 255 English characters but only ~85 Korean characters. Always check the byte count when working with Korean text in systems that have byte-based limits.
Check your text length in real time.
Use the Character Counter Tool