Twitter Planning To Double The Character Limit To 280

Twitter has recently announced that it will increase the character limit for its worldwide users to 280. This was disclosed by the company in a tweet, which pointed that this new feature is currently being tested out with a “small group” of people.

The company says that it has noticed that the previous character limit, 140 is not sufficient for people to express themselves properly. Thereby, the company is testing 280-character tweets to help users be more expressive.

Twitter linked a blog along with the tweet that announced the testing of the new character limit. In this blog, Twitter has given many insights and stated that “Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English. When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome!”

Explaining the insights of their product research even more in the blog, the company pointed that nearly every language that Twitter supports uses about 140 characters in most of its tweets. The blog states, “In languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French. …We see that a small percent of Tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters (only 0.4%). But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%). … Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English, but it is not for those tweeting in Japanese.”

The 140-character limit was originally established to reflect the length of SMS messages, which was how tweets were sent prior to the invention of mobile messaging apps. Although SMS messages have a 160-character limit, Twitter used the remaining 20-characters for the username.

Twitter has considered expanding the tweet length for years. But this time, the company has finally developed a character limit which will keep Twitter’s unique identity of providing real-time nature while giving a little more space for people to express their thoughts easily.