I’ve just spent a great deal of time researching the number of characters allowed on the business pages for the significant social media sites. I have been looking for content limits for the “About” section, and while this is not the only opportunity to tell your story on a profile page – with headings and banners requiring attention and creativity to maximize potential – it was not easy to find answers to this question.
Actually, in most cases, I found the number of characters by physically going to each site and passing the limit, rather than finding the answers online. To say it’s been a little bit frustrating is an understatement, so here’s hoping you find my blog if you’re looking for this information, and you don’t have to go through the same time consuming process.
The reason I was looking for it? I’ve recently worked with a company to reposition it top-to-bottom. Now that the content is finalised and the Website updated, the next step is to identify which social media channels the company should be present on. Together we’ve identified the social media sites below as being relevant, mainly based on my rule – join the sites where your customers are actively engaging in conversation, and sites that are good for business and SEO – such as Google+. By the way, every business should be active on G+ from an SEO perspective.
When a company needs to update multiple social channels with company content – which many are doing right now – it’s pretty handy to know how much information can be included in advance. If you know how much space you have, all you need to do is locate the most recent content to ensure consistent messaging across the Web, trim it down to fit (if necessary), and then include the most important information – because there’s just not enough space for everything. It’s definitely an exercise in focus, because you are forced to sharpen your message to fit within the character limits.
The sites I’ve covered are: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Quora, SlideShare and Google+. There are many others, but this is a good starting point.
1,500 characters – and remember spaces are counted as characters for all social media sites. LinkedIn has different sections where you can build out your story, such as products/services, so ensure the corporate content is focused and doesn’t overlap into products/services, otherwise you’re just wasting this valuable content real estate. Also, once you have your final company content up on LinkedIn, send it to all of your employees and ask them to update their personal profiles with the same company information. Consistency is good.
160 characters, although there’s now a banner for Twitter, so make sure you maximize this space too.
I was unable to find the exact information, so I put in 4,000 characters as an experiment and it accepted the content. I then put in 10,000 characters, and it accepted this too. I think a good rule of thumb would be to aim for a single page view. This example from Samsung Singapore is a good example of single page use-age and it’s about 1,500 characters.
However, Facebook has another About section, which is featured at the very top of a company Facebook page and it takes 255 characters. Make sure this is impactful content with links to your Website, blog, quotes, snappy statements, etc… because this is your chance to make a first impression! Don’t forget the banner potential too, but be sure to check in on Facebook for the rules. Everything is not OK.
The About section in your profile is 200 characters.
For a Board, you get 500 characters to explain what it’s about.
Quora
The best I could find is 596 – a Q&A on Quora itself.
SlideShare
700 characters in the About section.
Google
Even though I’m active on G+, I don’t have a G+ business page yet – something I need to do I know. However, another challenge I’ve faced this week is Google+ is having a few issues (is it just me?), so the task of setting up a business page to work out how many characters I can include, while it might fall over at any moment, is not appealing.
Therefore, I don’t know the exact number of characters a G+ page allows, although typically, it is more than the other social sites seem to allow. If anyone knows absolutely – can you please tell me? I’ve spent too much time searching for this information, with no result forthcoming. More than all the others, this has been very frustrating and surprising!
This link doesn’t provide the answer but it has some pretty detailed background if you want to set up a page on Google+.
I sincerely hope I’ve helped if you’re looking for this information and that it enables you to do all of your company pages in one go. Knowing how much content you can include, so you can prepare in advance, definitely makes it easier.
If you happen to know the G+ limit, I’d sure appreciate you sharing it? Also any other significant social media sites I’ve missed that you’re familiar with?
Cheers
Andrea
BTW you can like our Facebook page if you’re interested in what we have to say!
Thank you so much I was looking for this information everywhere. It’s been quite a while but I expect these character limits still hold true – thank you again!
Thank you very so much, this topic was very interesting and informative