Last month, Twitter began testing doubling the character limit of tweets with some accounts – garnering strong reactions from Twitter users.
Now, Twitter’s trial of a 280-character limit is to be expanded to users globally, the social media site has announced.
It says it hoped the move would stop people having to ‘cram’ their thoughts into 140 characters – and the news has already triggered a huge response online.
The expanded character limit is part of plans to make the social media platform more accessible and appealing, with Twitter looking to increase revenue and entice new users as it battles the likes of Facebook and Snapchat for popularity.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone tweeted: ‘In addition to more Tweeting, people who had 280 characters received more Likes, Retweets, @mentions, Followers, and were more satisfied with Twitter. So, you’ll be getting 280 too—enjoy!’
The expanded limit will be rolled out to users in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean – languages where cramming in tweets is not an issue, the company said.
Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen said: ‘In September, we launched a test that expanded the 140 character limit so every person around the world could express themselves easily in a Tweet.
‘Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter.
‘Looking at all the data, we’re excited to share we’ve achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue.’
‘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.’
According to data published by Twitter on the 280-character experiment, introducing the extended character count saw the number of tweets that hit the limit drop from 9% to 1%.
Twitter said it proved the extra space made it easier for users to ‘fit thoughts in a tweet’.
The company also said it found that the change had not affected brevity on the site.
What the tweets will look like: Twitter revealed this screenshot showing a normal tweet (left) and a new ‘supertweet’ (right)
‘We – and many of you – were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character Tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space,’ Ms Rosen said.
‘But that didn’t happen.
‘Only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters.
Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects 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.
‘As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline.
‘For reference, in the timeline, Tweets with an image or poll usually take up more space than a 190 character Tweet.’
The company confirmed the new character limit would now begin rolling out to users.
The social media giant has around 330 million monthly active users around the world.
Co-founder Biz Stone took, unsurprisingly, to Twitter to reveal the news
The 140-character limit was based around the SMS text limit, which was 160 character.
Chief Executive Jack Dorsey wanted a limit just below the SMS limit.
The character limit on Direct messages, which are sent privately between users, were scrapped earlier this year.
Images and other media attachments, such as GIFs, were also removed from the limit too in a bid to broaden the products appeal.
Biz Stone, the American entrepreneur who co-founded Twitter, explained the move on the social media site
It also stopped counting images and other media attached to tweets as part of the character limit in an attempt to improve the service.
And in 2015, the site was conducting tests which would introduce tweets of up to 10,000 characters, according to reports.
Twitter’s trial of a 280-character limit is to be expanded to users globally, the social media site has announced. The social network said it hoped the move would stop people having to ‘cram’ their thoughts into 140 characters