Character Limits for Styled Text on X, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn and More
Every network has a different character limit — and fancy Unicode letters can count double. Here are the limits that matter and how to keep styled captions under them.
Character limits are easy when you only post to one network. Once you share the same caption across X, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, and Instagram, you're juggling limits that range from 280 to several thousand. Add styled Unicode letters and the maths gets stranger, because not every platform counts a fancy letter as one character.
Main post limits at a glance
- X (Twitter): 280 characters for standard accounts; longer posts on paid tiers.
- Bluesky: 300 characters (counted as visible characters, so an emoji is one).
- Threads: 500 characters per post.
- Instagram: 2,200 characters per caption, 150 for the bio.
- LinkedIn: 3,000 characters per post; the 'see more' cut-off appears after the first couple of lines.
- TikTok: long captions are allowed, but only the first line or two show without tapping.
- Pinterest: 100-character title, 500-character description.
- YouTube: 100-character title, 5,000-character description.
- Facebook: very long posts are allowed, but anything past a few lines gets truncated in the feed.
Platforms change these numbers from time to time, so treat this as a working guide and trust the counter in your posting tool on the day.
Why fancy letters can count double
Normal Latin letters sit in the oldest part of Unicode. The letters most font generators use — bold, italic, script, fraktur — come from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block, much further along. Internally many systems store those characters as two code units instead of one.
X is the clearest example: it weights characters, and most characters outside the common Latin ranges (including emoji and these mathematical letters) count as two. A 140-letter bold sentence can use your entire 280-character post. Bluesky counts what you see, so styled text costs the same as plain text there.
How to keep styled captions within limits
- Write the plain version to fit your tightest platform (usually X or Bluesky).
- Style one line, not the whole caption. Headlines and hooks give the most impact per character.
- Move hashtags and links to plain text — they need to be plain to work anyway.
- Check every platform's counter before you publish, not just the one you wrote it for.
The last step is the one people skip. If you cross-post a lot, a tool that checks each network separately saves real time. Schedule For You's multi-platform composer shows a character counter and rule checks for each connected account as you type, and lets you shorten the caption for one network without touching the others.
Styles that cost the fewest characters
If you're tight on space, small caps are a good choice — several of the letters come from older Unicode blocks that are widely supported. Vaporwave full-width text is the most expensive in visual space, since every letter is double-width, so keep it to names and short bios.
Write a short, punchy styled headline with the Twitter / X Font Generator →