Three thousand characters allowed. About 140 visible on a phone, 210 on a desktop. And tapping see more counts as engagement — so the first two lines decide not just who reads you, but who ever sees you.
LinkedIn allows up to 3,000 characters per post, but "see more" cuts in far earlier — around 140 characters on mobile, roughly 210 on desktop. Most engagement is decided before that cut.
3,000 characters remaining
The first 140 characters, as seen in LinkedIn's mobile feed.
Start typing to see your preview…
This is the part that makes LinkedIn different from every other platform with a truncated post, and it is worth understanding properly.
On Instagram, a caption nobody expands is a caption nobody read. That is a cost, and it ends there. On LinkedIn, the tap itself is an interaction — so a post nobody expands is a post the feed concludes nobody found interesting, and it stops showing it to the rest of your network.
Which means the first two lines are not the introduction to your post. They are an audition for whether the rest of it gets distributed at all.
Roughly two short lines. The majority of LinkedIn traffic, and the harder constraint.
Three lines or so. More room, but the same audition.
Write for 140. A post that works on a phone works on a desktop with room spare; the reverse fails half your audience, and it fails them silently — you will see a low view count and no indication why.
A claim somebody might disagree with
Agreement is not interesting enough to tap for. A sentence somebody wants to argue with gets expanded, and then commented on.
A specific number
Not "we improved conversion" but "conversion went from 2.1% to 3.4%". Specifics read as true in a way generalities do not.
The end of the story, first
Lead with the outcome and let the post explain how. Chronological order puts the interesting part below the fold by construction.
A line break after line two
It forces the cut where you chose rather than where the layout landed. Most people discover the cut position by accident; you can set it.
The manufactured cliffhanger — a one-line hook, a dramatic pause, then see more. It worked well enough that everybody did it, and a feed full of the same device teaches people to scroll past it rather than tap.
A first line that states something real and specific outperforms one engineered to withhold, because the reader can tell which they are looking at. The cut still matters; the trick stopped.
Instagram has one cut rather than two and a different set of rules about hashtags. X counts links and emoji unusually. And if you are drafting something longer first, the word counter and the cliché finder are the two worth running over a post before it goes out.
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How long a piece takes to read.
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Essay Counter
Word goals and progress for longer drafts.
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Weighted counting and the real limits.
Instagram Counter
Where your caption gets truncated.