Free tool

LinkedIn Post Preview Generator

Paste your draft and see where LinkedIn stops rendering it in the feed. Roughly the first 210 characters on desktop, 140 on a phone, decide whether anyone reads the rest.

Your post

Paste the draft exactly as you will publish it, line breaks included.

Line breaks matter: the feed also collapses at the third line break
Only used for the avatar initials in the preview
The line under your name in the feed
Most feed sessions happen on a phone, so check the mobile width too

Feed preview

Rendered at 555px, the width of a post in the desktop feed column.

GM
Giuseppe Manzone
Founder at Dalil AI. Building the AI Sales OS.
1h · 🌐
···
Most outbound teams do not have a targeting problem. They have a follow-up problem. We pulled the numbers on 40 sequences last quarter. 71% of replies came after step 3. Almost nobody sends step 3.
👍 💡 ❤️ 476 comments · 2 reposts
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The visible window

198 / 210characters shown before the cut (desktop)

Cut by the third line break. 317 characters sit behind "see more".

515 / 3000
Total characters
11
Lines
83
First line characters
0
Hashtags (aim for 3 to 5)
0
Outbound links
0
Emoji
No hashtags
Add three narrow tags so LinkedIn has a topic signal for people outside your network. Narrow beats broad here: #outbound beats #sales.

How the feed renders a post

The collapse lands at roughly 210 characters on desktop and roughly 140 on a phone. Write the hook for the mobile number.
The third line break collapses the post too, so a short punchy opener can cut you off well before the character budget does.
Nothing below the cut can win you the tap. It is read only by people who already gave you one.
Outbound links in the body are widely reported to cost reach. Put the link in the first comment and say so in the post.
A post caps at 3000 characters. The composer stops accepting text there, so trim before you paste.

How this works

Why the truncation point is the whole post

A LinkedIn post in the feed is not a piece of writing, it is a preview of a piece of writing. The feed shows roughly three lines, which works out to roughly 210 characters in the desktop feed column and roughly 140 on a phone, then collapses the rest behind "see more". LinkedIn does not publish those numbers and they drift with layout changes, so treat them as a working budget rather than a spec. The point holds either way: a tap on "see more" is the moment someone decides your post is worth their attention, everything past the cut is written for people who already said yes, and the roughly 140 characters before it are doing all the work. Most drafts spend them on throat-clearing.

Line breaks collapse you earlier than you think

The character budget is not the only trigger, because the real rule is roughly three lines and a hard line break gets you there faster than a wrapped one. A draft that opens with three short punchy lines can be cut at 60 characters, well before the 210 budget. That is usually a good thing: a short hook, white space, then a second short line reads far better in a scroll than one dense 210-character paragraph. But you should know which rule is cutting you, because optimising for the wrong one wastes effort. The preview above tells you which one fired.

Links, hashtags, and the reach tax

LinkedIn optimises the feed for time spent on LinkedIn, and posts whose main call to action sends people elsewhere are widely reported to reach fewer of them. LinkedIn has never published a link penalty, so treat it as a strong pattern rather than a rule, and note that the workaround costs you nothing either way: put the link in the first comment, then add a line to the post saying it is there. On hashtags, three to five specific tags is the practical range. Ten generic tags do not multiply reach, they signal that the post was written for an algorithm. Pick narrow ones your buyers actually follow (#outbound, #revops) over category nouns (#sales, #business).

What to check before you hit post

Run four passes. One: read only the visible window out loud, on the mobile setting, and ask whether it would stop you. Two: confirm the first line is under about 100 characters so it does not wrap on a phone. Three: check that no outbound link sits in the body. Four: make sure there is white space every one or two sentences, because a wall of text in a feed is a scroll trigger regardless of what it says. The tool flags all four, but the read-out-loud test is the one that actually changes drafts.

A good post gets you replies. Something has to work them.

Dalil is the AI Sales OS: a CRM that captures the people who engaged, sequences that follow up across LinkedIn, email, and WhatsApp, workflows and AI scoring that decide who is worth the effort, and analytics that show which channel actually closed.