
Twitter has announced doubled its limit for tweets from 140 to 280 characters, a bid to pull in more users and boost engagement at the social network.
The roll-out includes all languages except Japanese, Korean and Chinese, in which space limitations have not been an issue, Twitter said.
Twitter has limited its users to 140 characters per tweet since its launch in 2006.
Product manager Aliza Rosen said in a blog post that “Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter. Looking at all the data, we’re excited to share we’ve achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue.”
Excited to share that after weeks of extensive data analysis and feedback, we’re expanding our character limit to 280! Read more about what we learned and how we came to this decision here: https://t.co/BcJnnpedjf
— Aliza Rosen (@alizar) November 7, 2017
According to data published by Twitter blog post, Historically, 9% of tweets in English hit the 140-character limit but only 1% of tweets with the extended character count hit the limit during the trial.
The company has been slowly enabling constraints to let people cram more characters into a tweet. It stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit.