November 8, 2017

Tweeting Made Easier! Twitter Rolls Out 280 Character Limit to All its Users

Great news for all the Twitter users! Twitter is finally rolling out the 280-character limit to most of its users. This rollout will be applicable to all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This feature comes one month after Twitter mentioned that it is working on doubling the character limit back in September.

The company made this decision based on the data of research which suggested that the longer character limit 280 characters would help the users to express their feelings in a better and precise way. With a character limit of 140, the users are forced to limit their words or break a single tweet into two tweets.

twitter-character-limit-280

Twitter explained the reason why it made the feature permanent:

“Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer. This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send Tweets faster than before.”

twitter-280-charcters

According to the research by Twitter, people got excited about the new feature and were even creative while writing the tweets. The results also suggested that when the users used more characters to express their thoughts, the number of likes, retweets, mentions, and followers also increased.

The increase in the character limit isn’t applicable to the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages because cramming is not an issue in these languages. “These languages have always been able to say more with their Tweets because of the density of their writing systems.” When it comes to language like English, people should compress their thoughts and words for tweeting.

Are you excited about the 280-character limit feature on Twitter? Drop your thoughts in the comments!

 

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Meghna


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