Every social media platform comes with character limits.
These limits help keep things standardized.
In this reference, I’ll give you the LinkedIn character limit for each part of your profile so that you can maximize the space that you’re using and be more effective with your marketing copy.
- The Important of LinkedIn Character Counts
- LinkedIn Name
- LinkedIn Headline
- Featured
- About Summary
- Skills
- Experience
- Interests
- Education
- Volunteer Experience
- Recommendations
- Accomplishments
- LinkedIn Character Limits: Status and Company Page Posts
- New Connection Messages
- Articles
- Takeaways on LinkedIn Character Counts
The Important of LinkedIn Character Counts
Characters are basically what you can type on your keyboard.
They don’t necessarily mean the number of letters, the count includes spaces, punctuation marks, numbers, and symbols.
Now just because there are a maximum number of characters that you can use in each section of your LinkedIn profile, doesn’t mean that you have to use them all.
This is not the point of this guide.
Understanding the LinkedIn character limit allows you to better plan the content that you want on your profile which helps with LinkedIn profile optimization.
This also ties into mobile and desktop optimization.
Remember that on mobile you have a limited amount of space that you can utilize as compared to desktop.
You want to be able to fill up the desktop screen “properly” while also making sure that you’re not spilling over when you’re on mobile.
A good example of this is the way meta descriptions are written for websites. Although viewing a search result on a desktop might give you more space, it’s totally different when it comes to mobile. You want to optimize for both.
LinkedIn Name
Let’s start with the first piece of text prospects will read about you.
Your first name can only have 20 characters while your last name can have 40.
Maiden names or former names can take up to 50 characters.
For companies, it’s 100 characters for the name in the overview section.
LinkedIn Headline
Your LinkedIn headline is one of the most important parts of your profile.
The LinkedIn character limit for headlines is 220 for desktop and 240 for mobile.
Since you’ve been given two choices, make sure you optimize for a maximum of 220 characters.
Also, remember this.
You don’t have to finish this character limit. You want to make sure that there’s just enough copy in there to grab your prospect’s attention.
Don’t bore them with something that’s too long.
Find out how you can create the perfect LinkedIn headline with our guide here.
Featured
For the Featured section, you’re limited to 100 character titles and 500 character descriptions.
This is a good section to show off what you do, but my tip is to keep the titles short and treat them like miniature headlines.
Look at the way Bill Gates has his Featured section organized. It’s short and brief, and anyone can easily go through it.
It makes it easier for someone skimming your profile to take in all the information you’re throwing at them. Plus, it’s less intimidating.
While you’re at it, get great thumbnails as well.
About Summary
You have about three lines at the beginning of your summary before your LinkedIn profile displays the rest as “see more”.
Personally, with my current summary, that translates to about 178 characters before it gets cut off.
That’s enough for one line, one line-break, and another one that leads to the main bulk of the summary.
However, for the entirety of the summary, you only have 2,000 words to work with.
Read about crafting the best LinkedIn about summaries.
Skills
For skills, you’re limited to 80 characters per skill. This isn’t so bad given that skills only take up around four to five words.
Experience
100 characters for the title and 2,000 for the description.
For the Experiences section, make sure that you list down the five biggest or significant experiences that you have.
If you list every single experience down, there’s a tendency that your bigger (and, better) experiences might be overshadowed by smaller stints.
You want to paint a picture of who you are based on the things that you’ve gone through.
Interests
You have 1,000 characters to tell the world about what makes you different from the other people out there.
Although this is part of profile completion on LinkedIn, you don’t have to dwell on this as much as your Experiences section.
Education
150 characters for the name of each institution that you were in.
Volunteer Experience
100 characters per organization that you did volunteer work for. Make sure that you populate this field, it showcases your CSR.
Recommendations
LinkedIn allows for 3,000 characters.
Accomplishments
You’re allotted 1,000 characters for this section.
LinkedIn Character Limits: Status and Company Page Posts
Personal LinkedIn status updates are limited to 1,400 characters per post. That translates to roughly 250 words.
Company pages have a shorter limit of 700 characters.
This makes personal status updates great for meaningful, growth hacking posts, while company page statuses can be used for quick updates or follow-ups.
Comments are pegged at 1,250 characters which are about 200 words.
New Connection Messages
For connection requests, you’re limited to 300 characters or 50 words.
But, this is a good thing because you want to keep these messages as short as possible.
People on social media have limited attention spans, and if you write something that’s too long, they might be put off by the length and end up skipping the request altogether.
This area has a shorter character limit for a reason.
Articles
Headlines should be 100 characters maximum with the post at 40,000 characters. That’s more than 6,500 words.
Comments also have a higher limit than usual, coming in at 1,750 characters for individual comments.
Now 6,500 words is a lot for a platform like LinkedIn, so you can use truncated articles where the real one is hosted on your website.
This is great for driving traffic from LinkedIn to your website.
Takeaways on LinkedIn Character Counts
You don’t have to take up the entire character allocation for each section. Just because you still have characters left doesn’t mean that you have to use all of them.
Less is more when it comes to optimization.
There’s a constant battle with attention span on social networks, and if you find that you can say the same thing with the same impact using fewer words, then you should go down that route.
You should be filling everything up, but you shouldn’t be approaching your maximum character limits.
Remember, make your characters count!