Following a successful trial in September, Twitter has announced it has increased its tweet length to a massive 280 characters, that's double the original 140 limit that it has used since it was founded in 2006.
The announcement was made, unsurprisingly on Twitter, by product manager Aliza Rosen who said, 'Excited to share that after weeks of extensive data analysis and feedback, we’re expanding our character limit to 280!'
On the company's blog Aliza expanded on their decision to increase the number of characters saying, '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.'
She went on to explain how research has shown that 9% of tweets in English hit the previous character limit, which would result in lots of time spent editing or even at times abandoning tweets. According to the blog post, during the trial only 5% of tweets that were sent were longer than the original character limit, with just 2% more than 190.
Because of the increased limit people would tweet more often and this would increase engagement on the platform. Aliza explains, 'people who had more room to tweet received more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions), got more followers, and spent more time on Twitter.'
So why was 140 characters originally chosen? According to many reports it was due to the early days of Twitter, when you could tweet by texting from your mobile phone. The worldwide standard length for a text message is 160 characters so the decision was made to stay well within that, allowing people to tweet from their phone. While it is now possible to send texts of a much longer length Twitter has kept its shorter character limit, until now.
This change to Twitter is global, except for a few countries such as China, Japan and Korea where their script based languages mean they don't need to use so many characters.
Don't worry if you don't have the full 280 characters yet, it is taking some time for the change to roll out, but it is coming!
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