Twitter Has Officially Doubled its Character Limit

The impossible has happened.

If you use Twitter and find it hard to express your thoughts in 140 characters or less (that has always been the character limit on Twitter), you might be excited to know that the social media giant has officially doubled its character limit. 

That’s right – you can now type 280 characters per Tweet.

This week, Twitter announced that they were officially making it easier to Tweet with the new character limit, since cramming thoughts into Tweets is often an issue for those who Tweet an English.

But according to Twitter, there was a soft launch – more like a tester – for users in September. Twitter allowed users to expand the 140 character limit just to see what would happen.

“Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter,” said product manager Aliza Rosen. “Looking at all the data, we’re excited to share we’ve achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue.”

That includes most all languages except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, because Twitter has found that cramming isn’t an issue in those languages because of the “density of their writing systems.”

In the past, according to Twitter, only 9 per cent of English Tweets would hit the 140 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,” said Rosen.

Time spent editing and often abandoning Tweets became less of an issue after the character limit expansion – that statistic soon dropped to only 1 per cent.

“Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer,” said Rosen. “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.”

Not only does more space make it easier to fit in a thought – Twitter found much more interesting results than that, results you might be able to leverage by taking advantage of the upgraded character limit.

It has to do with engagement.

“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,” said Rosen. “People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall.”

So, using more characters to Tweet might mean more followers for you.

What do you think of Twitter’s new character limit?