Make! It! Fit! Character counter for social media posts

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Hello,
and welcome to Make It Fit!

Introduction

This is a project which I created out of necessity in the time during which I managed multiple social media accounts for a civil society that I was part of. One of our activities was creating informative threads about the newest developments in cybersecurity, social media, and disinformation.

After perfecting each post in a thread, so that it would be easily comprehensible but also fit within the character count limit constraint of e.g. X/Twitter, we would find out that the same text breaks those limits on different social media platforms.

To publish the same text on every social media platform, there was a lot of back and forth, which only slowed us down. This is when I came up with the idea of an editor, which tells you whether the posts in your thread will fit on each social media site.

If you're looking to make your threads more engaging and improve your reach on social media, check out our guide with many tips and tricks that will help you achieve that goal.

Why is it so difficult to predict available character count?

Each social media platform a different number of characters which it allows in a single post. In some cases, such as Facebook or Linkedin, this limit is virtually non-existent, and you can write as long a post as you like. This is why these platforms are not included in this app.

You might suggest to pick the platform with the lowest number of available characters per post, and just make sure to write everything so that it fits there. Then it should also fit on every other social media, right?

Unfortunately, things are not so simple. Take URLs for example. When you want to link an article that you are referencing in your thread, some social media platforms will count every character in that URL, so you'd better use some kind of URL shortener. However, other platforms count each link as a constant number of characters (for example 23 in the case of X/Twitter). Then there are platforms like Bluesky, taking the best of both worlds, where each character in the link will be counted, but only to a maximum of 30 characters. Any character exceeding that limit will not be counted in the total length of your post.

And then there is emoji...

For many people, arrows, smiley faces and other symbols, is an unseparable part of creating a thread. These little picture can attract the readers' attention or help structure the text into a more readable form. Replacing e.g. country names with flag emojis can save some characters.

Unless you're only interested in writing serious threads without any such clutches, you might notice, that not all platforms treat emoji equally. On X/Twitter for example, each emoji is counted as two characters.

I call the resulting character count after applying every emoji as 2 characters the weighted character count. This measure is also important if you’re planning to write in some languages outside of English. Specifically, syllabographic or logographic languages such as Japanese or Korean. Characters of these languages also take up 2 character spaces each. This is not the case on other social media platforms, where the characters are not weighed.

Some older users of Twitter/X will remember the times when the character limit was only 140. At this point, weighed character count was not yet introduced, meaning that both English and Japanese user could write exactly 140 characters per post. This greatly benefitted the latter, as the Japanese language is much more compact — the same idea can be expressed in less characters than in English, because most words are just 2 characters long.

How to use this app

Now that you know the complexity of knowing in advance whether your threads are going to fit inside the character limit on each social media website, you are ready to start using the app. Just start by writing your first post, and more input blocks are going to appear for the subsequent posts in your thread.

You can also use the up and down arrows to change the order of posts in your thread. The emoji button will display an emoji picker. And the cross button can be used to remove a post from the thread.

The weighted character count for the following social media platforms will appear below each input: Twitter/X, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon.

I'm looking for ways to make this app better and I hope to be able to keep it up to date even if each social media platform's way of weighing characters changes. If you notice any inaccurate results from the app, I will be most appreciative if you could let me know.

The content is saved to local storage, which means that even if you close your browser tab, it will be saved on your device and appear again when you open the app again. For this reason, we recommend to always work with just one instance of this app open per each device.

I wish you luck in your creative writing and hope you will be attract many impressions and a lot of engagement with your threads.