Count Characters for Twitter Online

The character count updates as you type, next to characters without spaces, the word count, sentences and reading time, and a bar fills toward 280 underneath it. The bar turns amber once you are past roughly four fifths of the limit and red only when you go over, so you get the warning while there is still room to cut.

Two things about that 280 are worth knowing before trusting any plain counter, this one included. The platform counts a link as a fixed length whatever the address actually is, and counts many emoji and accented characters as two rather than one. A literal character count is therefore a close guide rather than the platform's own arithmetic.

For a draft that is mostly plain text the difference does not matter and counting here is faster than pasting into the compose box. If your post is heavy with links or emoji, leave yourself a few characters of headroom.