The cut is the whole post
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.
Will your hook survive the fold?
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
How it appears in-feed
The first 140 characters, as seen in LinkedIn's mobile feed.
Start typing to see your preview…
Expanding a post is an engagement signal
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.
140 or 210?
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.
What earns the tap
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.
And what stopped working
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.
More free tools
Most of these run entirely in your browser; the citation tools check references against public databases.
Word Counter
Words, characters, sentences and reading time, live.
Citation Checker
Check references and case citations are real.
Spot the Change
A daily game: find what a rewrite changed.
Daily Crossword
A newspaper-style crossword, new every day.
Case Converter
Switch text to UPPER, lower, Title or Sentence case.
Word Cloud
Your most-used words, drawn bigger.
Readability
How easy your writing is to read, as a school grade.
Word Unscrambler
Type some letters, get every word they make.
Reading Time
How long a piece takes to read.
Citation Generator
Format a source for a reference list: APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard.
Essay Counter
Word goals and progress for longer drafts.
X / Twitter Counter
Check a post fits before you publish it.
Instagram Counter
See where your caption gets cut off.