What Meta's guide gives each placement
Meta's ads guide gives a primary text length for every Facebook and Instagram placement on our ad specs pages, and a headline or description length for some. As of 2026-10-22 unless a line says otherwise:
- Facebook feed (image): primary text 50–150 characters; headline 27 characters
- Facebook feed (video): primary text 50–150 characters; headline 27 characters
- Facebook stories (image): primary text 125 characters; headline 40 characters
- Facebook reels (image): primary text 40 characters; headline 55 characters (as of 2026-10-31)
- Facebook reels (video): primary text 40 characters; headline 55 characters (as of 2026-10-31)
- Facebook carousel: primary text 80 characters; headline 20 characters; description 18 characters
- Facebook in-stream video: primary text 125 characters; headline 40 characters
- Instagram feed (image): primary text 125 characters; headline 40 characters
- Instagram feed (video): primary text 125 characters
- Instagram stories (image): primary text 125 characters
- Instagram stories (video): primary text 125 characters
- Instagram reels (image): primary text 44 characters
- Instagram reels (video): primary text 44 characters
- Instagram carousel: primary text 125 characters
The guide gives no headline length for Instagram feed (video), Instagram stories (image), Instagram stories (video), Instagram reels (image), Instagram reels (video) and Instagram carousel, and a description length only for Facebook carousel. The preview shows the fields the guide lists for the placement you pick, and nothing it does not.
YouTube isn't here. Google sets its text lengths per campaign type and states some as limits, not recommendations, so they're on the YouTube spec pages.
Recommendations, all of them
On Meta's pages every one of these lengths sits in the same list, headed Text Recommendations. On the Instagram pages and on Facebook's feed, Stories, carousel and in-stream pages, each length carries the same small print: text over it “is allowed but may be truncated”. For Instagram Reels the note is more specific — primary text “can be truncated with an ellipse”, depending on device size and settings. Nowhere beside a text length does the guide state a maximum; the only maximum in those lists is the number of hashtags on Instagram.
So the counter here never says “too long” or “over the limit”. It says whether your text is shorter than, within or longer than the recommendation, and leaves the decision to you. Longer text is a choice with a cost: more of it may be hidden until someone taps. Where the guide gives a range rather than one number, as it does for Facebook feed primary text, the counter also tells you when you are under the bottom of it.
What most guides get wrong
Most spec sheets print these lengths as hard limits; Meta labels them recommendations. The difference matters when you write. A limit makes you cut a good line to fit a number; a recommendation tells you where the risk of truncation starts, and you can decide the line is worth it.
How this preview counts
The count is of characters as you see them. One emoji is one, even an emoji built from several parts — a family, a flag, a skin tone, a keycap. A letter with an accent is one, and a line break is one. That is what a reader counts by eye, and it is what the counter under each field shows.
Meta's guide words its lengths in “single byte characters” and does not say how it counts an emoji or an accented letter, so treat this count as a guide rather than a prediction of where truncation happens. If your browser cannot split text into characters this way, the preview falls back to a coarser count and says so beside the fields.
The “…See more” fold
Long primary text is folded in the feed behind a “…See more” link. Meta's guide says only that longer text may be truncated (on Instagram Reels, depending on device size and settings) and gives no figure for where the fold falls. A fold drawn at a fixed character count would be a guess. The preview therefore shows your text in full rather than cutting it at an invented point: read the count against the recommendation instead, and put what matters most in your first line.
The fields, by name
The fields carry the names Ads Manager uses. Primary text is the post above the image or video. The headline is the bold line under it, beside the button. The description is the smaller line under the headline. On a Story or a Reel the primary text sits over the bottom of the picture instead, which is why the preview switches to a vertical frame for those placements. In-stream video plays inside other videos, so it gets the counts without a mock.
Add an image and the mock shows it at the placement's shape; leave it out and the mock keeps an empty box of that shape, so you can judge the text against the frame either way. Your image stays in your browser like the text does.
Writing text for many ads
Counting one ad's text is quick. Writing it for every ad in a batch, for every placement, is the slow part. Terrads writes the post text for every ad it makes — primary text, headline and button — and counts it against each platform's fields, so the text is ready when the ads are.