Day: January 28, 2022

Anatomy of a Social Media Post: Get to the Point

A Michigan Tech Twitter post populated from Instagram uses three hashtags and lets the visual do the heavy lifting.

Your social media posts won’t always be brief. But they should always start with the most important thing you want to share, whether that’s “Sound on!” for a video (because people tend to consume social media on their phones with the volume off) or a simple “Huskies win.” The amount of characters visible at the beginning of your post (as well as the amount of characters allowed) is different on each platform. But short and to the point is always the best way to begin, sharing your main message in the first 125 characters. Here are the latest allowable character lengths for posts on different platforms. Remember that just because a post can be this long doesn’t mean it should be: 

  • Facebook: 63,206, cuts to “see more” at 477 characters. 
  • Instagram: 2,200 (30-hashtag limit), 125 characters before it cuts to see “… more.”
  • Twitter: 280 limit including links, no cutoff but 71-100 characters gets most engagement.
  • LinkedIn: 700 on Company pages, 1,300 on personal accounts, 140 characters is the “… more” cutoff. 
  • Pinterest: 500 character limit per pin.

Check out more on character limits and other details about post length including tips for blogs and videos and keep the social media questions coming to the University Marketing and Communications team at social@mtu.edu. We’ll get to as many as we can as fast as we can. For more insights, check out our social media field guide.