Twitter has officially launched the feature of posting longer tweets to all its user on Tuesday by doubling the character limits from 140 to 280 for all users. Twitter was testing 280 characters limit since September and claimed that people wished to have more characters in their tweet for more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions). The increase in character limits is applicable to most of the languages while Japanese, Korean and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters as they convey more thoughts in lesser characters compared to English or other languages.
In the blog post by twitter, Aliza Rosen, Product Manager at Twitter wrote:
During the first few days of the test many people Tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel, but soon after behaviour normalised. 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.
During testing phase, people were really excited about the 280 characters limit which was double from 140 character limits. People who got the 280 characters limit were seen experimenting, resulting in more retweets & increase in number of followers. People felt more satisfied as they were able to share their thoughts with more content.
Aliza Rosen, Product Manager at Twitter added:
We are making this change after listening and observing a problem our global community was having (it wasn’t easy enough to Tweet!), studying data to understand how we could improve, trying it out, and listening to your feedback. We’ll continue listening and working to make Twitter easier for everyone while making sure we keep what you love.
While many users welcomed this move, there are haters and trollers as well. The hashtag #280characters is trending on twitter with lots of users sharing their likes, dislikes and off course creativity with the new 280 characters limit. And now when 280 characters limit is finally rolled out, users are now strongly demanding the ‘Edit’ button, to allow editing the tweets, like its rival Facebook allows to edit a post after publishing it. It can surely save one some embarrassing mistakes!
Some of the tweets on the 280 characters limit: