Less than two months after launching a global test to expand the character limit in tweets, Twitter on Tuesday announced that it is now opening the 280-character limit tweets to users in all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The cramming is not an issue in these three Asian languages and their users will continue to have just 140 characters.
Twitter noted that the increased limit will allow for easier expression on the platform while keeping the brevity. Turns out the fears of user timelines being filled with long tweets were unfounded. The test data showed that the increased character limit did not profoundly change Twitter and apart from the first few days of the test, when the increased limit was new and novel, the users stuck to less than 140 characters.
“…people in the test got very excited about the extra space in the beginning and many Tweets went way beyond 140. People did silly (creative!) things like writing just a few characters per line to make their Tweets extra large. It was a temporary effect and didn’t last long. We expect to see some of this novelty effect spike again with this week’s launch and expect it to resume to normal behavior soon after,” Twitter’s Aliza Rosen wrote in a blog post.
The social media company claimed that the increased character limit helps with engagement and the users with longer tweets received more engagement and followers during the test period.
The increased limit will automatically be available for you, just make sure you have the latest version of the Twitter app.
In related news, Twitter is working on several more new features, which will be rolled out in the coming months, like a ‘save for later’ option for tweets, Twitter Lite Android app, and the ability to seamlessly create tweetstorms.