By lkolowich@hubspot.com (Lindsay Kolowich Cox)

When it comes to writing text for your blog and social media posts, many marketers wonder, “But what’s the character limit?”

It’s never a simple question — sometimes, it’s answered by parameters established by certain channels. And on other occasions, it’s more a question of what’s ideal.

For example, you probably know the character limit for a tweet is 140, but did you know that the ideal length is actually less than that? (Hold tight — we’ll explain why.)

While we’ve written before about optimizing your actual content, we thought it would be helpful to gather the numbers of character limits — both enforced and ideal — for different online channels, all in one place.

Below, you’ll find a more detailed guide to character limits and ideal character counts for posts on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, SnapChat, and YouTube.

The Length & Character Count for Everything on the Internet

1. Blog Posts

Source: Medium

Quick reference:

• Post length: 1,400 – 2,100 words
• Title: Under 60 characters
• Meta Description: Under 155 characters

Featured Resource: 6 Free Blog Post Templates

Post Body

When it comes to the length of blog posts, there are a few different items to consider. For example:

• According to Medium, posts with an average read time of seven minutes captured the most attention. Though the data on this is from 2013, this number is still widely cited.
• The average reading speed of native English-speaking adults remains commonly cited as 200-300 words per minute, based on the results of several studies.
• At that reading rate, the ideal post length is 1,400 to 2,100 words.
• That aligns with research previously conducted by Capsicum Mediaworks, which indicated that, on average, the top 10 results for most Google searches are between 2,000 and 2,500 words.

Source: Capsicum Mediaworks

But that’s just the post body — let’s have a look at the other areas of text that comprise a full blog post.

Title

The length of your title depends on your goals, and where it will appear.

Let’s start with SEO. Do you want this post to rank really well in search? It turns out, that often has to do with the dimensions of each entry on a search engine results page (SERP).

For Google, titles of search results are usually contained at a length of 600 pixels — which Moz measures as being able to display the first 50-60 characters of a title tag.

So, if you don’t want your title to get cut off in the search results, it might be best to keep it under 60 characters.

But when in doubt, you can double-check the length of your meta description and title tags with this handy tool from HigherVisibility, or you can …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog