All social networking platforms have character restrictions, which, frankly, can be quite annoying.
LinkedIn’s character restrictions are constantly increasing, making it difficult to keep up.
However, in order to get the most out of your LinkedIn content marketing, it’s critical that you stay up to speed on all of LinkedIn’s upcoming updates.
LinkedIn has doubled the character limit on LinkedIn posts, which is something you should be aware of.
The character limit for a LinkedIn post used to be 1300 characters. This number has now been raised to 3000 characters.
In terms of LinkedIn content marketing, it’s seen as a significant boost.
With this change, you’ll be able to try out some longer-form material in your LinkedIn posts. But how to use this change to your advantage?
Time to find out!
What is the maximum character limit for a LinkedIn post?
If you’re new on LinkedIn, you probably wondered – Is there a word limit to LinkedIn posts? It is quite understandable considering every social media platform has a limit of some sort. Well, the answer is yes.
LinkedIn post character limit 2020 was only 1300.
LinkedIn has finally realized that posts aren’t performing well on the platform and has proposed a new, lengthier style. As of June 2021, there’s a new LinkedIn character post limit – 3000.
This is excellent for refining your ideas and conversion rate.
It’s also risky because if you do it incorrectly, you risk putting your readers to sleep and being labeled a spammer.
To ride the wave, you’ll need to publish lengthier pieces, but don’t forget to mix up the material with graphics and shorter posts.
So, how are you going to make the most of this LinkedIn update?
How many words can you fit into one post?
The majority of individuals do not consider how many characters they are typing. Let’s admit it, we don’t see posts through characters – we see them through the number of words.
When we transform characters into words, everything becomes more intuitive.
We used to be able to make posts with 200 to 250 words inside the 1,300-character restriction.
The word count has been increased to around 500 to 600 words thanks to the new LinkedIn character restriction.
In other words, you can now use more than twice as many words in your LinkedIn articles.
How to change your LinkedIn strategy for longer posts?
Up until now, you’ve been used to the 1,300 character limit on LinkedIn posts. Now it’s time to get used to the new feature and contemplate how to up your game with all these new possibilities.
Use the creative freedom and flexibility
One of the best parts of the increase to 3000 characters is that it allows you to be more creative and flexible with your posts.
I still advise you to make your articles and posts as brief as possible while maintaining their quality – you don’t have to fill the extra space just because you have it.
The crucial thing to remember is that no one is forcing you to write longer, but you can if you want and need to.
Create a standardized call to action template
You should use a standardized call to action template for all your LinkedIn posts.
Before the new feature, the main issue was that you virtually always had to rewrite or reduce your posts in order to fit them under the 1300-character restriction.
As a result, perhaps you didn’t always save as much time with templates as you could have if you didn’t have to alter them.
This is no longer an issue, thanks to LinkedIn’s new 3000 character restriction.
You have considerably more breathing room with 500 to 600 words and don’t have to edit your posts 20 times to fit everything under the character restriction.
This allows you to develop templates that don’t need to be tweaked for each new post.
It’s a terrific method to streamline LinkedIn content marketing and save time.
Don’t over-optimize
Many people used to spend one-third of their time producing LinkedIn content and the other two-thirds optimizing it. The limited character restriction on LinkedIn was to blame for this.
As a result, there were hours of lost work squeezing out the final 20 to 100 characters to fit everything in.
You just had to make sure that your stories still functioned with fewer characters, that the message remained intact, and that the general readability remained excellent.
To give you an idea of how ludicrous some of these optimization tricks used to be, consider the following:
- Transition words like “and” would be replaced with “&” or “+.” This would save you 10 characters if one message had five instances of “and.”
- Depending on the number of lines, removing the dots, question marks, and exclamation points at the conclusion of the phrase might save you another 10 to 20 characters.
- When none of this worked, you probably had to make more drastic modifications, including eliminating all filler words and drastically cutting sentences. Instead of “You may think this is a horrible idea, but…” you’d say, “Is this a bad idea? No.”
This is no longer an issue from this point forward.
While writing, you don’t have to be concerned with each word and consider ten various ways to abbreviate it.
I’m still a firm believer in clarity and simplicity, and I try to communicate ideas in as few words as possible.
Still, there’s a small line to be drawn between achieving clarity and getting things done and over-optimizing, which entails spending 10 times the time required.
Focus on the text flow and style rather than word count
The loss of readability and flow was one of the consequences of over-optimizations.
Many posts often ended up depending on incomplete phrase fragments that seem more like an extremely short headline or one-word tweet, rather than grammatically whole sentences that organically connect paragraphs.
Going forward, you should concentrate more on the creative side, experimenting with words and seamless transitions to improve readability rather than the word count.
Be more creative with dividers
Every character mattered in the past. And every character you didn’t use meant you’ll have less headaches when it comes to posting and optimizing your content.
Because of this, unless the topic was extremely brief, we seldom used all of the tools at our disposal to structure and add visual clarity to LinkedIn posts, such as separators and emojis.
In the future, don’t be afraid to experiment more with emojis and dividers.
Repurpose content
Long-form content recycling and reuse on LinkedIn is now much easier.
The varying character count constraints are one of the most difficult aspects of repurposing material across numerous social media platforms.
You must select the least common denominator for the character limit if you want to avoid optimizing posts for each platform.
This has always been LinkedIn, which had 1300 characters.
With a character restriction of 2200 characters, this duty has now transferred to Instagram.
You can publish your post on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook without editing a word if you keep it to 2200 characters or 300 to 400 words.
It’s also much easier to publish summaries or teasers of one of your articles on LinkedIn, with a link to the full post at the conclusion, thanks to the new enhanced character count.
Conclusion
The new character limit may not sound that big of a change to some, but when you think about it in the context of word count, it is definitely a significant increase.
You can now write 500-600 word LinkedIn posts, and that is a game-changer.
It’s time to reconsider your LinkedIn strategy and optimize it with this new feature in mind!