Last September, Twitter announced that they were looking at increasing the character limit of tweets from 140 to 280 for languages where cramming was an issue and that a few users were already testing it out. Today, the company is happy to announce that the 280 character tweet limit for those languages, including Filipino, is now official.
During the first days of the testing, Twitter revealed that a lot of people used the full 280 character limit because it was new and exciting, but after a while tweets normalized. The company also confirmed that users were able to tweet easier and more often, especially for those who needed more than 140 characters, due to the added limit.
The expansion was due to tweets that often hit the character limit. According to Twitter’s data, 9% of tweets in English reach the 140 character limit which often resulted in users spending a lot of time editing and shortening it or even just completely abandoning it. Now, with the 280 character limit, only 1% of English tweets hit the limit and users are spending less time in editing and shortening their tweets.
Twitter is also assuring it’s users that timelines will not be clogged with 280 character tweets as during testing only 5% of the tweets went over 140 characters and only 2% went over 190. Feedbacks from the tests were also very positive, people who had more room to tweet got more engagements and followers, not to mention they also spent more time on Twitter. Overall, testers were pleased with the increase of the character limit.
