Twitter Removes Tweets character limit

Twitter's decision to double its character count from 140 to 280 characters last year has not dramatically changed the length of Twitter posts. According to new data published by the company this morning, Twitter is still a place for shorter thoughts, with only 1% of tweets hitting the 280-character limit, and only 12% of tweets longer than 140 characters.

Brevity, it seems, is baked into Twitter - even if they get extended space, people don’t use it.

Only 5% of tweets are longer than 190 characters, indicating that Twitter users have been trained so long to keep their tweets short, they have not adapted to take advantage of the extra room to write.

Meanwhile, most tweets remain very short, Twitter says.

The most common length of a tweet back when Twitter allowed only 140 characters was 34 characters. Now that the limit is 280 characters, the most common length of a tweet is 33 characters. Historically, only 9% of tweets hit the 140-character limit on Twitter, now it's 1%.

For Lead Generation Services

That said, Twitter saw some impact from the doubling of character count in terms of how people write.

It found that abbreviations are used much less than before. Instead of writing in "text speaking" like "u r", "u8," "b4" and others, people now use correct words. For example, the use of abbreviations such as "gr8" has decreased by 36%, use of "b4? has decreased by 13%," and "sry" has decreased by 5%. Other words have increased as a result, including "great" (+ 32%), "for" (+ 70%) and "sorry" (+ 31%).

Twitter also points out that the use of "please" and "thank you" has increased in the year since the character count changes, by 54% and 22%, respectively. But don’t take those metrics to mean that the Twitter community itself has a friendlier, softer tone. Sentiment expressed in the network can not be followed by the use of polite words alone - especially if they are part of less than polite conversations, or used sarcastically, for example. You would need real sentiment analysis for that.

Perhaps unrelated to sign increase, Twitter has found that the number of tweets with a question mark has increased by 30%, and overall, tweets are getting more responses.

To be clear, the data for English are using Twitter, but the company says the findings are consistent across the seven languages??analyzed.

One thing that Twitter did not measure was the use of threading, which today seems to be the more popular way to express longer thoughts. Discussions, which are related series of tweets that tell a longer story, seem to be more popular than ever before. They also seem to benefit from the extra characters, in many cases. These long form tweets often announce themselves, by tweeting "THREAD" at the beginning.

But Twitter did not analyze the use of threads, or character counts in them, either, so it is unclear to what extent they have changed after the increase to 280. (We have asked if they have access to this data, and will update if they can deliver it.)

As a proxy, however, tools that help Twitter users read threads have seen an impetus in use in recent months. For example, in August, Thread Reader App tweeted a graph showing the global ranking of its website.

Passionate Digital Marketer