Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
Twenty-five characters an option on X, about twenty on an Instagram story sticker, sixty-five on a YouTube community poll. None of them agree with each other.
A Japanese post with 140 characters in it is at the limit, not halfway to it. X weights CJK characters as two, which is why a shorter caption can be the one that overflows.
Numbering tells a reader how much is left, which keeps them reading. It also costs characters on every post, and the style with the total in it cannot be written until you have finished.
X keeps one file per photo and serves it at six named sizes. The timeline shows you a middling one; the largest is a single word away in the URL.
A phone screenshot of a post looks poor when scaled and proves nothing about who wrote it. Here is how to share a post as an image without misleading anyone.
A link preview not showing is almost always one of six things. Here they are in order of likelihood, each with the check that confirms it.
A thread is a sequence, not a chopped-up article. Here is where to break, what each post has to do, and how to split long writing without mangling it.
The Twitter character limit is 280 for most accounts, but URLs, emoji and non-Latin scripts are not counted one-for-one. Here is how the weighting works.
How to post on X and Threads properly: the real character limits, how a thread should be structured, and why your link card shows the wrong image.
Twitter image sizes on X: 16:9 for single images, 1200x628 for link cards, and the timeline crop that decides what people actually see.