Twitter has decided to stick to the earlier proposition of increasing the number of characters to feature in a single tweet. This has been made official by the giant micro blogging platform after a period of time for testing which was met by a high percentage of criticism from the few selected individuals who did the testing.
Twitter claims that from the findings after the testing which started in September deduced that people who had more room for lengthy tweets resulted in more engagements.
In a blog post from the official company’s website, the company explained that it had solid reasons to make the 280 character limit permanent.
“Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer. This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say and send Tweets faster than before.”
Even though the option to write 280 characters has been made available to the general public worldwide, a lot of people have opted to go the traditional way of keeping their tweets brief as it was before. Others who seem to have benefited from the decision to add the surplus 140 characters are like the Merriam-Webster dictionary company who utilizes the feature.
https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster/status/928042000548532224
The feature is therefore available to tweets written in English whereas those who use Twitter in Japanese, Chinese and Korean will still use the normal 140 characters because they are able to convey a lot more meaning in fewer characters.