Reading Time: 3 minutes
It changed so fast through a period, a large number of Twitter users didn’t know how many characters are there on Twitter for a long time.
Twitter has had a hard time in the last few years, but the company managed to bounce back because it learned well from past mistakes and made significant improvements to its features.
This means that Twitter is becoming more critical to marketers. Therefore, you should not only write to the network but also to make sure it is interesting enough.
When Did 140 Characters Rule Change for Twitter?
Until 2017, Twitter’s writing limit was 140 iconic
characters. However, this has changed since the micro-blogging social network
has increased the character limit of all Tweets to 280 characters.
Again, visuals and videos won’t go away from this limit, so
you can write great captions, titles, and hashtags for your visuals.
Note that Twitter DMs (direct messages) can be up to 10,000
characters long. However, since DMs are the equivalent of private messages,
this is less worrying.
280 characters for tweets doesn’t mean you should take advantage of every word and character, because it increases the length of your tweet.
No one wants to read that long on a micro-blogging platform.
Buddy Media’s data show that tweets between 71 and 100
characters interact with longer broadcasts. Specifically, 17% of these tweets
are more likely to be retweeted or otherwise interacted.
How 280 Characters Affected Twitter?
Two years have passed since the character limit on social networking Twitter increased from 140 to 280. Celebrating the second year of the new 280-character limit, Twitter shared data showing how users’ trends have changed after this innovation.
Also, this is a fact and we know it: People are generally more flexible to point out their opinions and have more ways to express themselves truly. In this case, we can say that 280 characters allow us to share more context-rich and in-depth tweets.
The social media network, which is 326 million monthly active users around the world, said this about increasing the character limit: “We made this change because we want everyone from around the world to express themselves easily with a Tweet. Our aim was to make it possible while maintaining the speed and shortness that made Twitter.”
A Synopsis of the Change
Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey, summarized the changes in the
platform after the character limit was increased to 280 as:
- There has been an increase in the use of the words “please” (+54%) and ‘thanks’ (+22%) since the doubling of the limit.
If you hate writing words properly, for example, if you make
abbreviations like l ‘hll0’ instead of hello, you might have been got stuck in
the last year.
- Abbreviations such as ‘Gr8’ (-36%), ‘b4’ (-13%) and ‘sry’ (-5%) experienced a significant decrease in their usage
- While normal words like ‘great’ (+32%), ‘before’ (+70%), and ‘sorry’ (+31%) experienced crucial increases in contrary.
- Tweets with question marks (?) had an increase of (+30%). It seems like tweets are searching for answers nowadays.
Tweets generally remain concise. There was a 140-character
limit, while the number of characters from 34 to 33 with the 280-character
limit.
In the past, it was seen that 9% of Tweets reached the limit
of 140 characters. This reflected the difficulty of fitting the ideas to a
Tweet in line with the restrictions.
- With an extended number of 280 characters, only about 1% of English Tweets have reached the 280-character limit.
- 12% of Tweets sent are more than 140 characters and 5% more than 190 characters.
- Globally, 6% of all Tweets are over 140 characters, and 3% are over 190 characters.
Conclusion
To sum up, we can easily say that short Tweets are still preferred but there is a no distinct separation or difference between the usages of both character counts.
However, it is also a fact that Twitter observed that people’s writing style and online slang changed dramatically over two years.
Nonetheless, this might not be the main reason why they shifted their voices towards traditional words.
What can we do with this result?
- Consider posting tweets that are marketed in nature using a maximum of 280 characters, but you don’t have to do that on every tweet.
- Use extra characters when using customer service answers; you do not need to abbreviate all other words.
- Generate creative tweets like everyone else on the platform and social media should still be fun.
- I think it’s not about the size of your tweet, but about the quality of your tweet.
So, are you one of those people who love to tweet long, or short? Let us know right down in the comments!