LinkedIn Post Preview

Most people meet your post as a few lines in a fast-moving feed. LinkedIn shows the opening of the text, then a see more link, and everything after that link is hidden until someone chooses to expand it. Whatever sits above the cut is effectively your whole post for the majority of people who scroll past.

The LinkedIn composer does not show you where that cut will be. You write in a wide box on desktop, publish, and only then discover that your carefully built opening was split mid-sentence on a phone. The preview on this page closes that gap. It renders your draft in a card the width of the feed, on both a phone-sized and a desktop-sized column, and draws a dashed line where see more is likely to appear.

The editor above is loaded with a short example so you can see the fold straight away. Replace it with your own draft, switch between Mobile and Desktop, and adjust the first lines until the part above the line works on its own.

The fold is not a fixed number of characters. It depends on how many lines LinkedIn shows before truncating and on how many characters fit on each of those lines, and both change between devices.

Desktop. The feed’s text column is about 555 pixels wide, enough for roughly 72 characters of typical English per line. LinkedIn appears to show around three lines before see more. Separately, the preview caps the visible part at about 210 characters, so a desktop reader sees at most that much, and fewer if your opening has short lines or blank lines.

Mobile. On a typical phone the column is closer to 360 pixels, which fits roughly 44 characters per line, and LinkedIn appears to show only about two lines. The separate character cap on mobile is about 140, so a mobile reader sees two short lines or up to about 140 characters, whichever ends first.

The line count and the character cap are two separate heuristics, and the preview folds at whichever limit your text reaches first. These numbers come from our own measurements and from published estimates by other tools, which disagree with each other. LinkedIn has not documented them, and they can change with font size settings, browser zoom and app updates. The practical rule holds regardless: write for the phone, because that is the smaller window.

The preview uses two steps so that it is both instant and as close as we can get to the real feed.

Step one: a character and line heuristic

As soon as you type, the fold is estimated from your text alone. Each line of your post is counted as one or more rows depending on its length, and blank lines count as a full row each. The first three rows on desktop, or two on mobile, are kept above the fold, with an overall cap of about 210 characters on desktop and 140 on mobile. This works before anything is drawn on screen.

Step two: measurement

Once the card has rendered, the preview measures the actual text in a column of the feed’s width, using your browser’s own fonts. It finds the row where the visible lines end and moves the dashed line there. This step catches what the heuristic cannot: wide emoji, styled letters, long words that force an early wrap, and differences between operating system fonts. Styled letters come from tools like the bold text generator, and they can change where a row ends.

If the two disagree, the measured position wins. You may see the line shift slightly just after loading; that is the measurement replacing the estimate.

Knowing where the fold falls is only useful if you shape the opening around it. A few techniques make the visible lines do more work, and the LinkedIn post templates give you ready layouts with the opening line written first.

• Finish a thought above the line. A complete first sentence reads as confident; a sentence chopped by see more reads as an accident. If the cut falls mid-sentence on mobile, shorten the sentence rather than hoping people click.
• Open a loop, close it below. Give the reader a reason to expand: a result without the method, a question without the answer, a list that starts above the fold and continues below it.
• Spend blank lines carefully. Each empty line costs a full row. One after the hook is enough.
• Avoid a slow warm-up. Lines such as “I have been thinking a lot lately about” use the most valuable rows to say nothing. Start with the point.
• Do not hide the key detail. If your post announces a role, an event or a launch, the what and the when belong above the fold, not below it.

After editing, toggle the preview between Mobile and Desktop once more. A good opening reads well on both.

Before you copy the post into LinkedIn, run through these checks in the preview:

1. The first line makes sense without the rest of the post.
2. On mobile, the dashed line falls after a complete sentence.
3. No more than one blank line sits between the hook and the next line.
4. Styled words still read clearly at phone size.
5. Lists line up and their markers are consistent.
6. The counter below the editor is comfortably under the 3,000-character limit. The LinkedIn character counter covers the limits for comments, headlines and About text too.
7. Names, hashtags and mentions are in plain letters so they stay searchable and clickable.

When everything passes, press Copy and paste the text into a new LinkedIn post.