How long should the text on a TikTok slide be?
Viewers give a photo slide about three seconds. That works out to 8 to 20 words per slide and 14 for the hook. Here is the reasoning, the numbers, and a checker for your own slides.
· 5 min read · by Reelazy
Try it: paste your slides and see which ones are too long
One slide per paragraph. Runs in your browser.
One slide per paragraph. Slide 1 is judged as a hook (14 words max). Nothing is uploaded.
That ring of unmelted wax usually starts with a too-short first burn
Wax remembers its first melt pool. Next time it melts back to that smaller circle.
Let the melt pool reach the jar edges. Keep any burn under 4 hours.
Save this before your next burn.
Every TikTok photo post is a reading test the viewer did not sign up for. They are holding a phone, half-deciding to swipe, and your slide has to be understood before the thumb moves. The limits below are not style preferences. They come from how fast people read on a phone while distracted, and from how TikTok auto-advances slides when a post plays in the feed.
The numbers to remember
| Slide | Words | Characters | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hook (slide 1) | up to 14 | up to 90 | Read before the first swipe decision, about 2 seconds |
| Content slides | 8 to 20 | up to 160 | Fits three lines of 54 px text inside the safe zone |
| Call to action | up to 12 | up to 80 | One instruction, no explanation |
A person skimming on a phone reads roughly four words per second. Twenty words is five seconds, already longer than most viewers wait. Fourteen words for a hook is about three and a half seconds, which leaves time to look at the photo too.
Why the hook is shorter than everything else
The first slide is doing two jobs at once: telling the viewer what the post is about and giving them a reason to stay. A long hook fails at both because it has to be read to the end before it makes sense. Short hooks state one specific thing and stop.
Compare:
- "If you have ever wondered why your candle burns down the middle and leaves wax on the sides, here is what is going on" (24 words)
- "That ring of wasted wax has one cause" (8 words)
The second is not cleverer. It is simply readable in the time available, and it leaves the explanation for slide 2, which is where explanations belong.
Rhetorical questions ("Struggling with tunnelling?") are the most common way to write a long, weak hook. They cost words and give nothing back. A statement of the problem or a number does the same job in half the space.
One idea per slide
Most slides are too long because they carry two ideas. "Trim the wick to a quarter inch and let the first burn last three hours" is two instructions. On a phone it becomes three lines, the reader has to hold the first half in memory while reading the second, and the photo behind it is ignored.
Split it. Slide 3: "Trim the wick to a quarter inch." Slide 4: "Let the first burn run three hours." Each slide now reads in under two seconds, and the post gets one more swipe, which TikTok counts in your favour.
If splitting pushes you past eight slides, the post is trying to do too much. Cut ideas, not words.
Line breaks are content
Where you break lines changes how fast a slide reads. Break at the natural pause, not at the edge of the box:
- "Let the melt pool reach / the jar edges / before you blow it out"
- not "Let the melt pool reach the / jar edges before you / blow it out"
Two or three lines of similar length read fastest. One very long line and one short one look like an error. Four lines of anything is a wall.
Font size sets the real limit
The word counts assume text large enough to read at arm's length: about 54 px for body text and 60 to 72 px for the hook on a 1080-pixel-wide slide. At those sizes, 160 characters fills three lines inside the safe zone. If you shrink the font to fit more words, you have not gained space, you have made the slide unreadable and the count meaningless.
The right response to text that does not fit is always fewer words, never smaller type.
Where short text goes wrong
Short is not the same as vague. "Better burn, every time" is short and says nothing. "Forty hours from one jar" is the same length and says something a buyer can check. The test for every slide is whether a specific person in your audience learns something they did not know, or sees something they recognise from their own kitchen or desk.
Concrete nouns, small numbers, and the buyer's own words for the problem make slides shorter and more useful at the same time, because you stop needing adjectives.
Captions are a different budget
The caption is not read under a time limit. It appears under the post and expands on tap, so a two-sentence caption with a question or a nudge to save is fine. What does not work is repeating the slides in the caption. The viewer already read them.
A quick editing pass
Before you export a post, read each slide aloud with a stopwatch. Anything over three seconds gets cut. Then cover the photo with your hand and ask whether the words alone still make sense; if the slide only works with the image, the image is doing the talking and the text can be shorter still.
The checker at the top of this page does the counting for you, slide by slide, and flags the hook separately.
Frequently asked
Do these limits apply to other languages? The three-second budget applies everywhere, but characters per word differ. Vietnamese and Spanish run slightly longer than English for the same idea; German noticeably longer; Japanese and Chinese much shorter. Judge by reading time, not by character count, when you write outside English.
What about numbered lists on one slide? A list of three short items (under four words each) can sit on one slide and still read in time. Longer items belong on separate slides.
Should the product name be on every slide? No. A small logo or handle in a corner is enough. Repeating the name in the text costs words on every slide and reads as an advertisement from slide one.
Is there a minimum? A slide with a single word is fine if the photo carries the meaning. Empty slides, or slides that only say "wait for it", waste a swipe.
Want slides like the ones in this article? Make them in Reelazy — describe your product, approve the outline, post to TikTok.