Facebook character limit

Search for this topic and the same two figures appear everywhere: 63,206 characters for a post and 8,000 for a comment. We searched Meta’s own sites for both and found neither, and a search of Facebook’s Help Centre for “character limit” returned no article about the length of a post or comment. What we can say is that no Meta page we read gives either number.

Treat the first two rows as unconfirmed. They may be right, and planning around them costs nothing: 63,206 characters is roughly 10,000 English words, far more than a post is ever likely to need. The rest of this page covers limits you can check.

Meta’s Send API reference, the page developers use to send messages from a Facebook Page, describes the text parameter as a message that contains only text. It must be UTF-8 and have fewer than 2,000 characters. That applies to anything a Page sends through the API: a chatbot, a shared inbox tool or a comment-to-DM automation.

Read the wording closely. “Fewer than 2,000” means 1,999 at most, so do not build to the round number. The reference counts characters, while Instagram’s messaging API counts bytes and stops at 1,000. The lines we read do not say how an emoji or an accented letter is counted, or what happens to a longer message, so leave a margin and cut the text to length before it is sent.

• A metadata string you attach to a message, which comes back to you in the message_echo webhook, must have fewer than 1,000 characters.
• A card sent with Meta’s generic template takes a title and a subtitle of 80 characters each, with up to three buttons.

When someone comments on a Page post and you answer them privately, the message goes through the same Send API. Meta’s reference describes comment_id as the way to send a message as a private reply to a visitor’s comment on your Page post, and post_id for a private reply to a visitor’s post on your Page. It lists no separate text limit for either, so plan on the same cap as any other Messenger message.

Length is rarely what stops these messages. Meta allows one private reply per comment, within 7 days of the comment, and the first message to a commenter has to be plain text with no link or button. A line or two that asks the person to reply is plenty. The long part can follow once they answer.

Tip: Do not squeeze everything into the first message. Ask one question, such as “Reply YES and I’ll send the price list”, and put the full details in the message that follows their answer.

Meta’s Ads Guide gives text lengths for each placement. It lists them as recommendations, and longer text may be cut off on screen. These are the figures listed for image ads.

If you turn a post into an ad, check its text against these figures first. A caption written for the feed can be much longer than any of the three.

With no figure for posts, the useful question is what people read, not what the box accepts. Facebook folds a long post behind a “See more” link, and we found no Meta page that says where the fold falls. It depends on the device and the text, so look at a draft on your own phone before you publish.

• Put the point, the offer or the instruction in the first line or two.
• If the post asks people to comment a word such as GUIDE, say so before any long story.
• Keep the details for the private reply, where the Messenger limit is the one that counts.
• Answer comments in a sentence or two. A reply under a comment is a comment, so the unconfirmed comment figure is the one in play.