Social networking is a key tool for businesses both big and small, if you can use social media to full effect your business will reap the rewards, here’s a guide from the ZC team to you about how long or short your social media posts should be.
Twitter
Twitter has the shortest character limit of the four social networks listed in this blog post, with a character limit of 140. The 140 characters include spaces and punctuation marks, aswell as links. Links take up twenty three of your precious characters. Until a short time ago images would also eat into your character limit, taking 11-15 away. This was removed to the delight of many and I personally hope links follow suit. However I would never personally like to see the 140 character limit be increased as it makes twitter unique! The 140 character limit does not apply to direct messages that you can send to users which is another innovation that we think is fantastic, your DM’s can be as long or as short as you wish. Because you are limited to only 140 characters, both longer and shorter posts are effective on twitter.
With 1.71 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the largest social networking website on the planet. You get a much larger 2,000 characters on Facebook, however we would not recommend that you use all of them. Our recommendation is that you use around 150-300 characters on Facebook, not taking into account images (which use no characters) and links (which use 68 characters). If your Facebook posts are too long users may become disengaged and not read the whole post, while much shorter posts are more suited to other social networks like Twitter and Instagram. It’s about finding that middle point.
On Linkedin, you have 700 characters available for your use, and we would make the most of them. Linkedin is a networking website that offers you a lot of variety, both long and short posts work, whether that be a short and snappy one liner as a caption for an image or a published post. Your published posts can be up to 40,000 characters long. If you don’t know much about Linkedin, it’s basically a business people’s version of Facebook, so you have a huge range of business people on the site, hence why longer posts work just aswell as short posts! Links on Linkedin take 98 of your characters away whilst images take away none.
And finally, Instagram! The photo sharing app has 300 million daily users and is a big hit with the younger generations, with 90% of it’s active users being under the age of 35. Instagram allows you a huge 2,200 characters, that’s one long photo caption! We would recommend short and snappy captions, let the photo do the talking. If you are going to upload a photo with a much longer caption, the image needs to be eye catching so it draws the attention of the user. With Instagram, any links you put in your photo captions are not directly clickable so it is easier to say something along the lines of ‘Link in bio’ so users go to your profile and get to the website through there. You can use a maximum of 30 hashtags in your photo captions, use as many or as little as you wish, hashtags increase the chance of likes but they need to be relative to your photo. An app we would recommend to find relative hashtags is the HashMe app, with the app you simply type in a keyword and it gives you thirty other hashtags that are both relative and will get you the most likes.
Social media is about trial and error, it is finding out what works best for you and what doesn’t. I hope this guide can help you to perfecting your social media!