Character limits for each social network

When scheduling posts, it's good to keep in mind that each social network has its own character limits in place. The table below outlines the character limit for each social channel.

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Notes

• *Extended character counts for paid X users are available on our Free, Essentials, and Team plans. If you are a legacy customer on our Pro, Premium, or Business plans and would like to switch to our updated pricing, please email us at hello@buffer.com and we’ll be happy to help!
• **Mastodon is decentralized and each server sets its own character limit. Buffer now automatically reads the limit from your connected server and uses it, so if you're on a server that allows 11,000 characters, that's the count you'll see in the composer. If we can't read your server's limit for any reason, we fall back to 500.
• Images can also take up character space in your post. If the character count goes down when you add an image (as it does for X/Twitter and LinkedIn), this is a social network that factors images into your character count allotment.
• When mentioning users on Mastodon (e.g. @jane@exampleserver.com), only the username (e.g. "jane") will count against your character limit – the domain is not counted (e.g. @exampleserver.com).
• It's possible that when posting natively, the character limit is higher. That is because some of the limits imposed by a social network's API*** are stricter than those imposed on the native platform.

What is an API? It's the access that one application (in this case, a social network) gives to another application (in this case, Buffer or any other third-party). :::