Why has Twitter doubled the character limit for tweets to 280?

As Asian languages have the capability to fit more thoughts into fewer characters, the limit still remains. For example, on an average the length of a tweet in Japanese is 15 characters.

In the blog post, Twitter mentioned that expanding the 140-character limit would ensure easier expression and higher frequency of tweeting.

But why increase the limit?

“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,” said Twitter in a blog post.

A graph showing percentage of English tweets that are hitting the character limit with 140 and 280 characters (Source: Twitter Blog)

As per the company’s analysis, around 9 percent of tweets hit the character limit ceiling that was leading to “lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending”, hence the need to expand the character count, which reduced the problem to 1 percent of the tweets.

Twitter has ensured that people will not be bombarded with longer tweets in their timeline, as even with the 280-character limit, only 5 percent of tweets were longer than 14- characters and only 2 percent were over 190 characters.

Also, tweets with an image or a poll usually tend to have lesser number of characters.

The move also showed that Twitter, in general, received more engagements, likes, mentions and followers and people ended up spending more time on it online.

The company did not say when it would start allowing users to post 280-character tweets.

Users have criticised several other Twitter changes in recent years, including a non-chronological timeline, new ways of replying to tweets, replacing stars with hearts, circular profile photos, and a new font.

As usual Twitter users were the first to 'embrace' the raised character limit with their tweets. Here are some of the reactions:

(With inputs from Reuters)