Twitter has officially doubled its character count.
It hasn’t even been two months since the company tested extending tweets’ maximum length to 280 characters. On November 7, Twitter enabled the new length for all users. This new character limit will apply to tweets in languages except Korean, Chinese and Japanese, in which space isn’t as big of an issue.
According to a Twitter spokesperson, advertiser won’t yet have the ability to make use of the new length for ads created through Twitter’s self-serve platform, they’ll be able to post 280-character-long tweets and run those as Promoted Tweets. 280-character ad support will roll out to Twitter’s self-serve platform sometime “in the coming months,” the spokesperson said.
The reason Twitter chose to officially adopt the 280-character maximum as quickly as they did was because it didn’t make much of a difference, at least a negative one. One of the things that has worried some is that the extended length of tweets would make checking Twitter feel like paging through a Tolstoy novel. That hasn’t happened yet.
Those who were in the Twitter test group testing longer tweets hardly did so. Of all tweets that published by the test group since the test began in late September, only 5 percent exceeded the standard 140-character limit. 2 percent topped 190 characters. “As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline. For reference, in the timeline, Tweets with an image or poll usually take up more space than a 190 character Tweet,” Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen wrote in a company blog post published on Tuesday.
Originally, twitter opted to test the expanded character count because there was some frustration by some users when they hit the 140-character limit, forcing themselves to make edits. There would be some that making edits is a good thing, but being forced to do so could also scare off new users, reverting to stagnating user growth and suppressing its declining ad business.
After making the change to longer character tweets, There has been fewer instances where people are forced to edit their tweets for length. With the 140-character limit, 9 percent of English-written tweets hit the character cap. But, with the new 280-character limit, the number has dropped to 1 percent, according to Twitter.