Please familiarise yourself with our previous post on “How frequent Should You Post on Social Media?” That article ties in well with this article on Optimal and Ideal Post lengths for Maximum Engagement on Social Media
We believe regardless of how frequent you post, one thing remains king. That one thing is the quality of content you produce. We have all sat for minutes pondering if our tweet makes sense. We have read countless of Instagram Algorithm articles that push for hashtags but not sure of what is the optimal count. Oh yes and that dreaded Facebook Ad headline? (so many ads have died here).
In a nutshell, we will focus on:
- YouTube
- Blog
Facebook feed post
40-80 Characters is the sweet spot. Posts that contain 40 characters or less earn 86% more engagement. Jeff Bullas also states that Facebook posts with 80 characters or less get 88% more engagement.
Our social media manager clients state that you must:
- keep your posts short and concise
- Get straight to the point
- No one wants to expand your post to read more lengthy stuff
- Think about your readers time
Facebook Ads
Remember there are 3 components of Facebook Ads:
- headline
- main text/Ad body
- news-feed link description/Facebook Ads Link
Ad Headline
5 words are the sweet spot for ad headlines.
Heropost Observations:
- Shorter headlines are better structurally and visually.
- Facebook will cut you off like you’re at an award show if your ad headline is too long(notice the ellipses)
- Ad Expresso wonderfully researched this point and the graph below shows the 5-word sweet spot
Main text/Body
14 words is the sweet spot.
Heropost Observations:
- Like most things keep your text tight and to the point.
- Make it clear and relatable
- Ad Expresso wonderfully researched this point and the graph below shows the 14-word sweet spot
News-feed link description/Facebook Ads Link
18 words is the sweet spot here. Remember this is the text that lies directly below your headline.
Our social media manager clients state that you must:
- The purpose of your ad is to drive people to a landing page.
- Think about your description, it must be catchy, smart and descriptive enough to provide info on what you’re selling or want.
- Remember…..nb nb, Facebook will automatically add your metadata from your linked page. What is important to grasp is that:
- Firstly that text might not be as compelling as you’d want for an ad.
- Secondly, you can and should replace it with custom text.
- Ad Expresso wonderfully researched this point and the graph below shows the 18-word sweet spot
Facebook Character Limits or Maximum Character Lengths
- Facebook’s post character limit 63,206 characters
- Facebook username character limit: 50 characters
- Facebooks Page Description: 155 Characters
- Facebook Comments: 8,000 Characters
Facebook Business recommended this number of characters for ads.
Facebook image ads
- Headline: 40 characters
- Text: 90 characters
- Link description: 20 characters
Facebook canvas ads
- Body Text: 500 characters
- Button Text: 30 characters
Facebook link ads
- Text: 90 characters
- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
Facebook video ads character limits
- Text: 90 characters
- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
Facebook lead generation ads
- Context card headline: 45 characters
- Benefits text: 5 bullets with 80 characters each
- Button text: 25 characters
- Custom question text: 50 characters
- Privacy policy link text: 100 characters
- Custom disclaimer title: 60 characters
Facebook collection ads
- Headline: 25 characters
Tweet
Ideal Length of a Tweet and the sweet spot is 71-100 Characters. Twitter’s best practices reference research by Buddy Media about tweet length states that, 100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet.
Heropost Observations.
- Twitter is fast so you also need to match that speed therefore 100 characters should be enough
- Be clear, implement gifs and emojis to standout
- Have hashtags to engage longer
- Track Social also found that the perfect Tweet length was right around 100 characters and their brilliant chart illustrates this
Twitter Maximum Character Limit Lengths
- Tweets: 280 characters
- DMs (Direct Messages): 10,000 characters
- Handle: 15 characters
- Profile name: 20 characters
Remember these vital points
- DM Links don’t count toward your character limit.
- Images don’t count toward your 280 characters
- Handles at the beginning of a reply don’t count toward your 280 characters.
LinkedIn Status Update
The sweet spot for LinkedIn Status Updates is 50-100 Characters. Its a professional site but with talks of LinkedIn stories mode like what Instagram has, time will only tell how far it will develop.
LinkedIn Maximum Character Lengths
- First name: 20 characters
- Last name: 40 characters
- Page name: 50 characters
- Company name: 100 characters
- About us/Summary: 2,000 characters
- Company update: 700 characters
- Company leaders’ headline: 150 characters
- Company leader’s description: 150 characters
- Employee testimonials: 400 characters
- Custom module title: 150 characters
- Custom module body: 500 characters
- Custom module URL label: 70 characters
- Recommendation: 3,000 characters
- LinkedIn Publishing post headline: 150 characters
- LinkedIn Publishing content-length: ~120,000 characters
Instagram Captions
Instagram caption sweet spot is 138 to 150 characters. Social Report suggests that your Instagram captions should be even shorter, less than 125 characters.
Heropost Observations
- people only read the captions for posts that interest them.
- captions are great for description and context
Instagram Ads Captions
Instagram Ads sweet spot stands at 125 characters.
Heropost Observations
- Remember Instagram is visual and your image or video should sell itself all text should do is just guide is along.
Hashtags for Instagram Captions
The ideal Hashtag number is 5-10. However, TrackMaven has found the ideal number of hashtags in an Instagram post is 9. Look at this wonderful chart TrackMaven researched. It shows that once you go beyond 10 hashtags your engagement rate takes a nosedive.
Heropost Observations
- ensure the hashtags you use are relevant to the post
- Don’t just overload on hashtags
- The best ways to get your posts seen is through hashtags. Check out our article on using hashtags
- Do not use the same 20+ hashtags in all your captions this may affect the visibility of your post
Best Number of Characters in an Instagram Hashtag
TrackMaven continued his research and looked at the ideal number of characters in an Instagram hashtag. It showed that hashtags with 21 characters gave the most engagement. Below is that research. 
Instagram Character Limits
- Instagram Caption Character Limit: 2,200 characters
- Instagram Hashtag Limit: 30 hashtags
- Instagram Bio Character Limit: 150 characters
- Instagram Username Character Limit: 30 characters
- Instagram Ads image/ video: text: 2 rows of text
- Instagram Ads Carousel image/ video: text: 90 characters
- Instagram Ads (all types) – no image can be more than 20% text
Pinterest Character Limits
- Pinterest profile name: 20 characters
- Pinterest bio: 160 characters
- Maximum number of Pinterest boards: 500
- Maximum number of Pins: 200,000 (this includes secret Pins and Pins on group boards you didn’t create)
- Pinterest username: 15 characters
- Pin description: 500 characters
- Pinterest board name: 100 characters
- Pinterest board description: 500 characters
Heropost Observations
- If you don’t fill out a title, people will see your Pin description instead.
- set up a Pinterest Business Page. to use valuable analytics.
- Complete your entire profile for SEO purposes
- Always add a pin description or link source to pins. You get 500 characters within a pin description so use keywords related to your business and relevant hashtags to maximize your description’s context. Also, you must link back to your website, blog and other social networks to drive traffic to your business.
YouTube Character Limits
- Video title: 70 characters
- Playlist titles: 60 characters
- YouTube tags: 30 characters per tag, 500 characters total
- YouTube description: 5,000 characters
The YouTubers that use Heropost state that:
- They state that people tend to forget that YouTube is a search engine therefore it relies on text to organize and rank content.
- The text YouTube relies on are titles, playlist titles and descriptions. These have to be scroll stopping and really popping for you to receive more views.
THE IDEAL LENGTH OF A BLOG POST
The sweet spot is 7 minutes or 1,600 WORDS as stated byMedium in 2013
The Hook Agency says its 1,760 Words for SEO success and the minimum is 300 words. They continue to state that Google’s algorithm prefers more content when going head to head on shorter content posts–helping blog posts with over a 1,000 words do better on average–and driving up the average significantly.
Search Engine Journal – 1,900 Words.
Satish Gonesh – 1,000 – 1,500 Words
Moz- says there’s no such thing as the Best length for SEO. You need to check this one out.
Check out this Informative Infographic by Sutherlandweston
Finding Out What Works
The above article on Optimal and Ideal Post lengths for Maximum Engagement on Social Media was just a guideline just to keep you informed. Every business and every person is different. The audience that you might be targeting may respond better with longer cations and some shorter.
How do you find out what works? Our Social Media Manager clients state that running extensive A/B tests will help you determine if the suggested character counts in this guide article are ideal for you.
We hope that this article on Optimal and Ideal Post lengths for Maximum Engagement on Social Media helped.
