Twitter doubles its character limit to 280
NEW YORK: Twitter says it’s ending its iconic 140-character limit—and giving nearly everyone 280 characters.
Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.
The company says 9% of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. People end up spending more time editing tweets or don’t send them out at all. Twitter hopes that the new limit will make people tweet more, helping its lacklustre user growth. Twitter has been testing the new limit for weeks and is starting to roll it out Tuesday.
“We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained,” said Aliza Rosen, product manager, Twitter.
In addition to more tweeting, people who had more room to tweet received more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions), got more followers and spent more time on Twitter during the experiment.
The company has been slowly easing restrictions to let people cram more characters into a tweet. It stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit. Even before it did so, users found creative ways to get around the limit. This includes multi-part tweets and screenshots of blocks of text.
Twitter’s character limit was created so that tweets could fit into a single text message, back when many people were using texts to receive tweets.