Twitter Expands Character Limit to 280 for Users

• Posted By Amritesh
• On November 8th, 2017
• Comments: no responses

Twitter has formally announced the doubling of character limit for majority of its users through a blog post on Tuesday. The limit has been doubled for most of the languages were the need was felt to provide more spaces for expression. However, Chinese, Japanese and Korean language has not been provided the benefit of the increased limit as they require lesser space to convey as compared to other languages.

The revision in limit will be rolled out over the next few days.

Twitter had started experimenting with the increased character limit in September with limited number of users. Some people did express concerns that increasing limit could affect the flow of feeds. But Twitter has claimed that increased limit did not have any major impact the services during the testing. Although, the character has been increased but Twitter does not expect the limit to be widely used immediately.

Observation

Twitter has also shared observations made during the experiment with small set of users. According to report, only 5% of tweets exceeded the 140 character limit, while just 2% exceeded 190 characters. Only 1% touched the 280 character limit during the testing, whereas 9% of the users reached the original limit of 140 characters. Another interesting trend observed during the testing, Users initially got very excited about the extra space and many of the tweets went above the original limit. However, the trend was short lived and soon it normalized.

Opinion

In my opinion, it is a welcome move by Twitter as I too have felt constrained by the 140 character limit, at times. Social Media network have expanded enormously over the last decade and various platforms are exploring ways to add more users to their base. As they need to adopt market strategy which would put them ahead of their rivals and provide more avenue for business expansion.