Twitter officially doubles tweet limit to 280 characters for all users

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it is extending the 140 character limit to 280 characters in all languages where cramming was an issue. For India and the Indian diaspora, this update will apply to the six regional languages supported on the platform - Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil.

In September, Twitter had launched a test that expanded the 140 character limit to enable every person around the world to express themselves easily in a tweet.

During the first few days of the test, many people Tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel, but soon after, the behavior normalized, it stated. Twitter saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often.

Easier to Tweet
Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit it stated. This reflected 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 Twitter saw tweets hit the character limit less often, it believes people spent less time editing their tweets in the composer.

We're expanding the character limit! We want it to be easier and faster for everyone to express themselves.

More characters. More expression. More of what's happening.https://t.co/wBpYdy1K40

— Twitter (@Twitter) November 7, 2017

Keeping Twitter’s brevity
Twitter was concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space, but that did not happen. Twitter stated that only 5% of tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters. It feels the timeline reading experience on Twitter should not substantially change, and people will see about the same amount of tweets in their timeline. For reference, in the timeline, tweets with an image or poll usually take up more space than a 190 character Tweet.

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, the company mentioned. People in the experiment said 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.

Languages like Japanese Korean and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages, the company said.