So you’ve created an Automatic Audiogram: awesome! But, you noticed that your captions are getting cut off on social media or YouTube, which is not so awesome.
This article will help you learn some of what Headliner does behind the scenes to get your audiograms uploaded for you while also walking you through the best practices and limitations of each platform, helping you to ensure your captions don’t get cut off!
Why captions are getting off
Each platform has their own unique character count limits. They are listed here below:
- Instagram - 2,200 characters
- Facebook - 63,206 characters
- Facebook Reels - 5,000 characters
- Threads - 500 characters
- X (formerly Twitter) - 280 characters
- TikTok - 4,000 characters
- YouTube - Video titles, 100 characters. Video description, 5,000 characters.
- LinkedIn - 3,000 characters
- Bluesky - 300 characters
Once your caption has exceeded the above character count for the designated platform, Headliner will block you from typing anymore in the caption box. However, things like dynamic elements can affect your captions and actually increase your character count. This leads to captions getting cut off in your videos’ descriptions.
What are dynamic elements and why are they cutting into my captions
Dynamic elements, in Headliner, are any elements you tell us to pull from your RSS feed. Things like show title, episode title, and episode number are all dynamic elements.
You can tell if something is a dynamic element by looking at the script tagging in the caption box. Anything with a < > surrounding text is considered a dynamic element.
And, because these elements are dynamic, meaning they are ever-changing, Headliner cannot properly predict how long each element will be for each post we need to create. This is why captions can get cut off. Headliner determines the character count initially by counting the characters, including the actual dynamic elements, in the original caption.
For example, the caption above ‘Here’s a new clip from <Episode Title>! Listen to the full episode here: <Link To Episode>’ is 121 characters. However, once this caption is actually posted, the dynamic elements will fill in, altering the caption. The posted caption will be ‘Grow your show with Headliner! Here’s a new clip from How Guests Spark Engagement: The Perfect Match for Podcast Growth! Listen to the full episode here: https://play.headliner.app/podcast/53fe327002dd4e9b8947be388f61d942/episode/620c88a2-be1f-46f9-8d1a-c2d91c69d9fe.’ This particular caption has 266 characters. Thankfully, this caption is still within Instagram’s caption limits so nothing will get cut off. However, if I were to add two or three hashtags, this particular automation would probably start to get cut off on X or Bluesky.
More help with captions
Hopefully, this article helped you learn more about social captions and Headliner. If you have any questions, please email us at support@headliner.app.