LinkedIn Character Limit: The Ultimate Reference

LinkedIn Character Limit: The Ultimate Reference

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
March 18th, 2021
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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

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.

LinkedIn Character Limit, LinkedIn Character Limit: The Ultimate Reference

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.

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.

LinkedIn Character Limit, LinkedIn Character Limit: The Ultimate Reference

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.

LinkedIn Character Limit, LinkedIn Character Limit: The Ultimate Reference

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.

LinkedIn Character Limit, LinkedIn Character Limit: The Ultimate Reference

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.

LinkedIn Character Limit, LinkedIn Character Limit: The Ultimate Reference

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!

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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