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Ideal Social Media Post Length: Your Ultimate Guide!

Sep 23, 2021 15 min read

When it comes to your social content planning, one size doesn't fit all.

Creating a highly engaging social media post is no easy task. You work hard to design the captions, choose hashtags & make creative images that convey the correct message about your brand to your audience, only to get limited by the creative restriction of several social platforms.

It's difficult to keep a complete track of the ideal social media posts length – because different networks have different requirements for each of their content formats.

And it's pretty obvious to get fed up with scheduling social content that exceeds the character count or posting images that don't look as good online as they should.

That's why we have compiled the ideal social media post length for major networks in this guide. The next time you plan any social post, give a look at this guide to create social posts that pop up on people's feeds!

Table Of Content

You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.

Ideal Instagram Post Length & Limits

When you post on Instagram, you compete with thousands of other brands for audience's attention. And with a shrinking human attention span of 8 seconds, the amount of your audience's attention you can grasp is very limited. In such a scenario, brands need to do whatever it takes to stand out and grab your audience's attention.

A huge part of this "whatever" is determining the correct size of your post that compels people to engage with your post and provides full context. Read on to figure out the correct limit for the style and success of your Instagram posts.

How Long Of A Video Can You Post On Instagram?

As a social media marketer, videos should be on your radar if you really want to take full advantage of Instagram as a platform. The optimal length for Instagram videos would depend on the type of Instagram video you upload.

Instagram Video Post Length

Instagram normally shows the length of a feed video in the upper right corner. Your Instagram videos can last anywhere from 3 to 60 seconds. You can trim and upload videos longer than 60 seconds by selecting a section for preview.

But most of the Instagram video viewers would taper off after a minute anyway. Hence making the cap of one minute for Instagram infeed videos makes perfect sense.

Instagram infeed videos that are around 26 seconds long have shown the best performance. Hence try to make your videos informative, visually appealing, and to the point on Instagram.

Instagram Story Video Length

Instagram story videos that come with a lot of embellishment options last only for 24 hours. Instagram story video length is pretty short as each story that you post can only last up to 15 seconds maximum.

If you prepare an Instagram story video greater than 15 seconds but less than one minute, Instagram will post that story into several sections of 15 seconds. And if you wish to post a video on your story that is longer than one minute, it will be trimmed manually into one-minute segments and then uploaded to your story.

How Long Can IGTV Videos Be?

Instagram also gives you an avenue to post longer video content. In the form of IGTV videos. This space is excellent for descriptive stuff such as tutorials. The Instagram IGTV video length is anywhere from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. If you have a verified Instagram account or an account with a large following, you can even upload videos that last up to 60 minutes! However, the optimal IGTV video length for better engagement rate is between 2 to 5 minutes.

Instagram Ads Video Length

The Instagram feed video ad length is between 3 seconds to 120 seconds, and the Instagram story video ad length is up to 120 seconds.

Instagram story ads are made up of several cards with each card containing up to 15 seconds of video or a single photo displayed for 5 seconds. An Instagram story ad can contain up to 10 cards, but only the first 3 will be displayed within the Instagram story feed. After that, viewers need to opt into watching more with a tap.

Ideal Social Media Post Length

How Long Are Reels?

Instagram initially introduced reels with a brief 15-second time cap and doubled it to 30 seconds just a month later. Recently Instagram extended and expanded Instagram reels length to 60 seconds giving creators a little more space to work with. However, people still prefer to watch 15 to 30 seconds reels.

Instagram Live Time Limit

Instagram live is a perfect choice when brands wish to promote their products, give a sneak peek of behind the scenes, hype up a live event or product launch, or host a Q&A. The Instagram live time limit is 4 hours maximum from the earlier 60 minutes session. According to Instagram, this would help instructors conduct virtual classes without interruption.

Instagram Story Length

One to seven Instagram stories is the optimal posting length with 80% and more completion rate. After 7 stories, the completion rate drops below 70%, which further decreases as you keep uploading more and more stories.

Mashable has confirmed that the maximum number of Instagram stories that can be posted at one time, either in the form of clips, videos, or images, is 100. However, there stands no limit to the number of stories that can be posted in a day. If you still have a lot of content to share, 15 is a good enough number for stories in one day.

Ideal Social Media Post Length

Image Source: Statusbrew Instagram

Instagram Story Music Length

If you use a static image for your story, the music in your story will run for 15 seconds maximum. If you are working with a video, the music will play for as long as the entire video runs. You can click on the number to the left of the music bar to change the length.

Instagram Caption Character Limit

For starters, it's essential to know the Instagram captions limit is 2,200 characters (which is darn long!). But just because you can use more characters doesn't mean you should.

People typically read the first three lines of an Instagram caption that appear before the "more" section. To read anything longer than that, they will have to hit the "more" button, which many people don't tend to. So aim for 125 characters or fewer to ensure your captions are read without clicking the "more" button. Your post will perform best if you limit your caption to 138 to 150 characters.

On the flip side, you will read some influencer's captions as long as 100 words or more! Long captions do work well for bloggers, travel guides, or any sort of education content. If long captions truly add value for your followers, then go for it! But a caption should never be long simply for the sake of it. In many cases, longer captions have resulted in increased engagement.

Know more about 350 Best Instagram Captions For 2021

Instagram Bio Length

Instagram bio limit is 150 characters which is quite enough to accommodate your basic information and include a link in bio for those who want to learn more about you. Instagram username character limit is 30 characters.

Ideal Social Media Bio Length

Instagram Hashtags Limit

Though Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags, 9 hashtags are the optimal. After a brief analysis, it has been seen that hashtags with 21 characters gave the most engagements. Up to 10 hashtags can be added to an Instagram story.

Know more about 300+ Best Hashtags For Instagram In 2021

Ideal Facebook Post Length & Limits

Facebook's audience is accustomed to longer pieces of information as compared to Instagram. So it's understandable that content formats can be a bit longer on this platform, and their optimal length is also a tad high than Instagram.

How Long Of A Video Can You Post On Facebook?

Apparently, Facebook strives to keep its audience on the platform for as long as possible. Maybe that's why Facebook infeed videos can be as long as 240 minutes. But human attention span remains the same irrespective of the platform.

Hence even on Facebook, shorter videos get your entire message across the News Feed most effectively. The optimal Facebook video length for better engagement is between 2 and 5 minutes.

Facebook Live Time Limit

Facebook live streams are a great way to put yourself out there and connect with your audience in real-time. Facebook allows live streams to run for as long as 8 hours. However, Facebook live videos that last over one hour increases the engagement rate from 0.26% to 0.46%.

Facebook Post Character Limit

Facebook is the perfect place to express your thoughts and story through long posts with a whooping 63,206 characters limit. Buzzsumo says that the ideal Facebook post length to get the most engagement is around 50 characters (or fewer).

However, it's completely fine to exceed the character limit in case your status update is an interesting one and worth catching several eyeballs.

Facebook Ad Video Length

In general, Facebook recommends keeping videos short irrespective of the format even though some ad placements do support longer videos. Ensure that your video's length is 15 seconds or less, which increases the likelihood of people watching videos until the end. Video ads that are 15 seconds or less are also eligible for Facebook in-stream placements.

Ad Video Length

Facebook Ad Character Count

Adespresso has analyzed a tremendous amount of 752,626 Facebook ads and discovered that the perfect combo for a sponsored post is a five-word headline paired with 20 words of ad text.

The character limit for primary ad text that will appear on the ads preview is up to 125 characters. You can write longer ad copies, but the rest will appear when the viewer clicks "See More." Headlines can occupy up to 40 characters and link descriptions up to 30 characters.

Facebook Story Time Limit

Facebook stories are short user-generated videos or photo collections that disappear after 24 hours, just like Instagram. Facebook videos' story limit is 20 seconds, and 26 seconds for Messenger.

Each photo or video you share in your story remains in the stories section on Facebook and the Messenger app for 24 hours. You can keep the stories you have shared in your story archive after 24 hours, which will only be visible to you then.

Ideal Social Media Post Length

Image Source: TechCrunch

Ideal Twitter Post Length & Limits

Twitter forces you to be concise, succinct, and clear in your thoughts since it moves ever so quickly with almost 500 million tweets per day. You literally only have fractions of seconds to catch your audience's attention, which is harder than on Instagram and Facebook. Keep reading to find out how you can achieve it.

Twitter Character Limit

The impact Twitter saw in terms of how people write a tweet after doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters was that people started using abbreviations much less than before. Earlier, only 9% of tweets used to hit the maximum character limit of 140, now it's become 1%.

Turns out medium-length tweets perform best. According to TrackSocial's study of 100 well-known brands popular on Twitter, you will get the most retweets if your tweets are within the character limit of 70 and 110 characters.

Buddy Media also found that engagement goes down as the character count on Twitter increases. Hence, tweets shorter than 100 characters get 17% higher engagement. The sweet spot for a tweet to gain retweets and engagements is 100 characters.

Twitter Handle

Image Source: Twitter

Twitter Hashtag Limit

Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement than those without them. But don't overuse hashtags in a tweet. Even though Twitter doesn't have a hashtag limit, tweets with one or two hashtags get 21% higher engagement than those without, and engagement drops as you add more hashtags. Ideally, Twitter hashtags should be as short as 6 characters or less as recommended by Vanessa Doctor from Hashtags.org.

Twitter Bio Character Limit

Twitter imposes a maximum bio length of 160 characters. And plenty of users aim to hit this limit exactly by including links and hashtags in their bios to make the most of this precious real estate.

Twitter Handle Length

Your Twitter handle name cannot be greater than 15 characters. Twitter allows profile names to be as long as 50 characters or even shorter than 4 characters. Handle names should be kept shorter for the sake of ease and should contain only alphanumeric characters (letters A-Z, numbers 0-9) or underscores.

Ideal Social Media Post Length

Image Source: Statusbrew Twitter

How Long Of A Video Can You Post On Twitter?

People watch videos on Twitter to follow the news and keep in touch with what is going on with their topics of interest.

According to Twitter, the platform receives more than 2 billion video views every day. Twitter has also revealed that tweets containing videos had 10x more engagement than ones without. So, publishing Twitter videos is probably a good idea. As Twitter users are accustomed to short, snappy, and easy-to-digest content on the platform, long videos particularly don't make sense.

Though Twitter has set the maximum video length to 140 seconds, a study found that videos running between 43 to 45 seconds are more likely to be featured by Twitter and have the highest engagement rates.

Ideal LinkedIn Post Length & Limits

LinkedIn as a social platform is used by many business professionals to gather valuable industry insights. For this reason, many brands post lengthy descriptions about their blog, product updates, case study, etc.

Sharing your new research is great, but it will not persuade users to click more and read completely if the post gets cut off before you get to the point. Here are some of the best tips to maintain the perfect size of a LinkedIn post.

LinkedIn Post Character Limit

LinkedIn has recently increased the post character limit from 1300 to 3000 characters including the hashtags. On the company page, your LinkedIn status update can be up to 700 characters long. Though LinkedIn articles have no actual character limit, reports suggest that posts over 120,000 characters get cut off by LinkedIn's blogging network.

LinkedIn will truncate your posts with a "See more" button after the 140 character mark. Hence, the ideal length for a LinkedIn post should be between 100 to 140 characters.

LinkedIn Video Length

LinkedIn was one of the last platforms to roll out the ability to upload native video in August 2017.

LinkedIn videos cannot be shorter than 3 seconds or longer than 10 minutes. LinkedIn also suggests that the most successful video ads are usually the ones that are less than 15 seconds long.

LinkedIn recommends video length under 30 seconds for brand awareness and brand consideration. The optimal video length is between 30 to 90 seconds for a video created to meet the upper-funnel marketing goals. Use longer videos to convey your brand or product story but take care of the 10 minutes informal cut-off point. LinkedIn allows you to post a 20 seconds maximum length video in your story.

LinkedIn Message Character Limit

LinkedIn message character limit is up to 200 characters in the subject line and 2,000 characters in the body paragraph. LinkedIn has found that messages with 150 words or less increase your chances of getting a response, and those over 200 words decrease the likelihood.

LinkedIn message character limit

Image Source: LinkedIn

Ideal YouTube Post Length & Limits

YouTube is now the largest video platform on the internet and the biggest search engine after Google. With a multitude of videos uploaded every single day, YouTube organizes content on its platform to provide a better user experience. Know how you can optimize your videos on YouTube to get them in front of your audience.

YouTube Video Length Limit

YouTube has a whole different concept in terms of video length. YouTube users are accustomed to watching long content as people not only watch how-to and tutorials videos but an entire TV show or movies on this platform.

Longer videos of a minimum length of 10 minutes have become more popular lately.

According to a study conducted by Google, of all the services available worldwide to watch videos, YouTube was by far the most common one used, with 78% of those surveyed having watched a video in the last 24 hours on the network.

The ideal length for a YouTube video is ten minutes, with videos between 7 to 15 minutes performing well on the platform. The best practice to follow here is to keep your video as long as it only needs to be.

YouTube Ad Length

The maximum length of a YouTube video ad depends on the type of ad.

  • Skippable video ad length is 6 minutes maximum & becomes skippable after 5 seconds.
  • Non-skippable video ad length is from 12 seconds to 3 minutes, but less than 30 seconds is recommended by the platform.
  • Bumper video ad length is 6 seconds maximum intended for brand awareness, and mid-roll video ad length 30 seconds minimum.

The most effective YouTube pre-roll ad length is between 15-30 seconds.

YouTube-Ad-Length

Image Source: YouTube

YouTube Title Character Limit

YouTube has a character limit of 100 characters for titles. It's recommended that your title be up to 70 characters as anything more than 70 characters will likely end up being cut off in search results.

YouTube Video Description Character Limit

The description of your YouTube video can be 5,000 characters long. YouTube descriptions are another way to increase the visibility of your video in search results and make it easier for people to find your content. So ensure to be descriptive and useful while writing this section, and don't forget to add links to your website and social presence to keep people connected with you.

YouTube-video-description

Image Source: Statusbrew YouTube

How Many Tags Should I Use On YouTube?

Similar to hashtags, YouTube tags serve to identify the content you have created. The maximum allowable characters for YouTube tags is 30 characters per tag and 500 characters in total.

Ideal TikTok Post Length & Limits

TikTok brought a revolution in the video marketing industry, showcasing the true potential of short videos. TikTok has not just grown in popularity over the last year, but it is also the most downloaded app. You need to abide by the specifications of the platform to elevate the experience of your viewers.

TikTok Comment Character Limit

TikTok limits posts and comment lengths to 150 characters, including hashtags.

TikTok Video Length

TikTok videos were initially started as 15-second clips that soon grew up to 60-second clips. The 3-minute videos were already on the cards and got picked up by the platform towards the end of 2020.

Character Counter - Know The Stretch & Withdraw Of Characters In Your Post Right While Creating It

How many times have you created an amazing social post but couldn't actually publish it just because it did not meet the required character count when you tried to hit publish?

What you need in such a case is a character count that's coupled with your social network so that you don't have to juggle between different platforms for composing & publishing posts.

Statusbrew, as a social publishing tool, helps you create a network-specific post that fits the size of each platform. The maximum character count of posts allowed by each profile you select is displayed at the bottom when you start creating the post. As and when you add or delete characters, the count gets updated in real-time. Once you are done, just publish the post right away, schedule it to post later, or send it for approval. All within a single dashboard!

Take Control Of The Characters Now!

It's not entirely about how much you post, but also what you post.

Tons of views and shares for your tweets and posts come in the vicinity of your reach when you fit them within the right length. Don't forget about the quality of social posts when looking into their length. Finding the correct balance between how much to post and what to post is where the real art of a creator lies.

Ensure your important messages get seen. Happy posting!

Looking for a social analytics tool to track the performance of your marketing campaign? Try Statusbrew. With several ready-to-use reporting templates and total flexibility to customize these reports, Statusbrew will help you determine whether your social initiatives have led to positive results and where adjustments are needed to strengthen your marketing campaigns.

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Statusbrew is an all in one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.

Rushali Das

Rushali is a B2B SaaS content writer who specializes in writing research-driven blog posts around marketing for B2B SaaS brands.

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