What the heck is a message segment?

Really simply it is a block of text that is 160 characters long (remember the character count on your brick Nokia phone from back in the day? 😉)

We’ve come a long way from the T9 days (praise the almighty emoji 🙏), so naturally message segments have also evolved. If you’re sending texts that only include numbers and letters, that really simple definition above still applies. But going beyond 160 characters and/or adding emojis complicates things.

Quick notes:

• An emoji isn’t considered one character. They’re a bit special 🥲 and require more work for service operators to correctly send to your recipients
• Not all emojis are created equally
  • 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 → this is actually 4 emojis combined into one, so the character count is much higher
  • 🦦 → “simple” emojis have a lower character count (but still are considered more than 1 character)
• Going beyond 160 characters adds special headers to your text so that it can send as one continuous message. These headers eat up at your character count, so 320 typed characters (160 x 2) will actually be more than 2 segments because of this.

Here’s an article describing this more in depth

Here’s a nifty visual tool that shows you the character breakdown of your message

Here’s a link to Laylo’s pricing sheet

We’re here to help

We don’t expect you to sit at your computer with pen and paper and count how many segments the message you’re about to send will be (but if you do, please take a picture and send it to saj@laylo.com).

We’ve added a helpful tool to every place in the app where you craft that perfect message to send to your fans.

As you type, we calculate how many segments your message will be. Each circle is considered 1 segment (whether it’s completely full or not). Just count the number of circles and you’ll have your magic segment number!

Some Quick Maths

To figure out how many credits your message will take to send (here’s a credits refresher for those who didn’t do their homework), use this simple formula:

<aside> 💡 # of segments * # of fans * 5 credits (International SMS is 25 credits)

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