It has been announced that Twitter is trialing a longer Twitter character limit for Tweets. The current limit is 140 characters.
This will be doubling and moving up to 280. The news was announced on the Twitter Blog by By Aliza Rosen and Ikuhiro Ihara who had this to say
Giving you more characters to express yourself
We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).
Twitter To Double It’s Character Limit to 280
140 characters have never been a lot to work with but then that was the point, Twitter is a micro-blogging site. But with the constant need to edit and scale messages down to meet the 140 character members have been left frustrated that they haven’t been able to convey their message exactly how they would want to.
And it is even more difficult if you want to add in some hashtags as well. This is not a problem for all Twitter users though because Twitter members from countries like Japan, Korea, and China can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other countries Tweeting in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.
Jack Dorsey the CEO of Twitter was one of the first to try test the new character limit:
There has of course been some criticism to this change. It has been pointed out that 280 character tweets don’t actually fit on the screen and some navigation is required to read the full message. It has also been pointed out that President Trump would now be given double space to Tweet his nonsense.
Biz Stone Co-Founder of Twitter was quick to point out that President Trump was not in the test group
This Twitter character limit increase is no doubt a gamble for this social media giant but probably one needed to be taken. Twitter is looking to continue to challenge Facebook’s dominance who themselves are starting to lose members to Snapchat. We have also seen Pinterest members growing a staggering 40% in the last year, having now passed the 200 million monthly active members mark. So the competition to keep users is very strong.
Takeaways
I see this increase in the Twitter character limit as a good move. We have seen Twitter’s monthly active user base declining and stalling in Q2 of this year, so something needs to change. How diehards will view this, well we will have to wait and see.
Another question to ask is how does this fit in with the Tweetstorm feature that is also in testing? And will we see hashtag limits imposed?. No one wants to see 140 character tweets with 140 characters of hashtags that’s for certain.
So it is over to you. Is the Twitter character limit increase a good move or not? Let me know in the comments below.
Regards
Dexter Roona
[tweetthis display_mode=”button_link”]Can’t wait for longer Tweets? The VERGE has a workaround to get you 280 characters right now! #smm rt@dexterroona[/tweetthis]
Can’t wait for longer Tweets to arrive? The VERGE has a handy workaround to get you 280 characters right now!
Related Posts
Twitter Announced to Expand Tweets Limit From 140 Characters to 280 for Trial
Twitter is testing 280-character tweets, double the current max
Erika Mohssen-Beyk
Hi Dexter,
good to hear Twitter will increase this limit.
Often there is trouble to get all into 140 characters.
Hopefully, we will see this soon.
Thank you for the information
Erika