Twitter messages can contain 280 characters

Twitter has doubled the number of characters that can be used for a tweet. The number has now been increased from 140 to a maximum of 280 characters. According to Twitter, there was a need among users for this increase in the number of characters.

All Twitter users in the world can use twice as many characters from now on, except for people in Japan, China and Korea, as these languages ​​are constructed in such a way that 140 characters can say relatively more compared to other languages.

In September, Twitter started a test that allowed users to use up to 280 characters for a tweet. Twitter says the purpose of the test was to make it easier for people to express themselves in a tweet. For example, the company thinks that users with the new limit are less likely to adjust their tweets to keep the number of characters within the old limit of 140. This would mean that users would spend less time per tweet and also send more tweets on average.

According to Twitter, users were generally pleased with the new 280-character limit during the test. Users would feel more comfortable with how they could express themselves and it was felt that there was more and better content to be found. People also gained more followers and spent more time on the platform, according to Twitter.

According to the company, the new limit was often used in the first days of the test, partly because it was new. After that, Twitter saw that the use of the new limit decreased, with most users sticking to the old 140-character limit again. As a result, the tweets kept the traditional brevity, which was important for Twitter to eventually implement the 280-character widening.

The company was concerned that the timeline for users would fill up too quickly at the new limit and that people would now always use 280 characters. However, according to Twitter, that is not the case. Five percent of all tweets sent during the test were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent were longer than 190 characters. Thus, Twitter believes the timeline reading experience will not change substantially with the large-scale introduction of the new limit.