Twitter Goes Long with Character Count

What happens when a social network that’s defined by its brevity loosens its length limitations? We’re about to find out. Twitter recently doubled its character limit from 140 characters to 280 characters. That means instead of being limited to a couple of sentences, users can now post a whole paragraph of content.

This change has led some to wonder if the value of Twitter will be lost in a sea of overstuffed messages. To those people, Twitter has a simple message: No worries. In this blog post, Twitter says that through their testing of the extended character count they found users pushed to the edge of the character limit at first, but then went back to mostly doing what they have been doing on Twitter for the past decade—sticking to shorter messages around the 140 character mark.

Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen states in the post, “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.”