The ideal social media post length. A complete guide to every platform

We all enjoy creating content for our social media profiles, and every time we want to make our post completed. We pick a good image (made by our own or token from someone), add hashtags and write a description. That`s it! Our post is ready and we add it to our timeline, so people could read it, leave likes and comments, share it with other people or even save (if possible).

However, some users are facing problems with their posts, specifically – writing a text part. Someone makes it too long, someone, conversely, too short. How to find the perfect balance? In this article, we picked up main rules of creating an ideal social media post length for all huge social media platforms.

Instagram

Everyone has his own opinion about Instagram`s post length. Someone said that there is no reason to make short photo description, someone says that it shouldn`t be as huge as in other social media. And, you know, it`s the right opinion. Instagram was created for visual content, and the main reason people use it is an ability to add photos and get feedback from other users.

However, we can`t add photos without any descriptions, so every post should have a text part. The ideal length of Instagram post is holding between 138 and 150 characters. However, it`s only the perfect number. In fact, we are able to make our descriptions up to 2 200 characters long, but people won`t read such descriptions! They could just scroll your post in the news feed and move to the next one, so your description should be short, informative and pithy.

Facebook

On Facebook people also prefer short posts instead of long, because with them they could receive more likes, comments and shares. However, Facebook has its own character limit.

An organic Facebook post should be up to 80 characters long. According to the BuzzSumo analysis, posts with 80 characters or less receive 66% higher engagement.

Here are some specific instructions to the structure of Facebook post:

• Headline, the first thing people see, is 5 words.
• Main text, the second part, is 14 words.
• Description, the text that lies directly below your headline, is 18 words.

If you will keep this formula in your posts, you will have a massive engagement.

Twitter

We all know that Twitter is the king of a character limit. However, even 140 symbols post could be too big for typical users. An organic Twitter character length is from 71 to 100 characters long. Again, if we`ll have a look on the analysis, we can find out that tweets with less than 100 characters have a higher engagement than longer tweets. That`s because short tweets are easier to read and comprehend. You also should remember that normal Twitter hashtag should be up to 6 characters.

LinkedIn

If talking about LinkedIn, we can easily say that this is a perfect social media for people who love reading articles. That`s why the normal LinkedIn post length is from 1900 to 2000 words. According to the statistics, such posts give users a highest number of likes, shares and comments.

YouTube

Someone can say that YouTube doesn`t look like a typical social media. However, it also has some strong rules about its content. The optimal video length is three minutes and the perfect title should have 70 characters or less.

Conclusion

All these principles are simple, but it will be better for you to notice them. If you will know what content should be added to each social media, you will have a massive engagement from each platform.