If you’ve updated your Twitter app lately, you might have noticed something really cool about the length of your tweets. Take a look at this:
That’s right.
Twitter now allows up to 280 characters per tweet!
Twitter Increases Their Character Limit
There’s been talk about expanding the potential length of tweets for some time now (Twitter announced their intentions in September) and the social network has been testing expanded limits since then.
If you don’t see the increased limit on your cell, try updating your app.
Fun fact: the former 140 character limit was plenty of space for languages like Korean and Japanese, but in languages such as English and Portuguese, the same amount of information takes more space to express. That led to abbreviations and cramming in some cases, while other people used the reply feature to create a string of tweets expressing a single thought – these are called Twitter rants.
Twitter did a study and found that markets where people speak the more condensed languages rarely reached the 140 character limit…and that those people tweeted more.
Knowing that, it makes sense that Twitter would expand the character limit for those of us who need a lot of letters to tell you about the cute thing our cat did this morning.
Tweet Your Heart Out
If you log into the updated Twitter right now, that little circle in the bottom right is your character limit. It slowly fills up as you type and gives you a warning when you have just 20 characters left.
For longtime Twitter users, the expanded tweet size feels downright luxurious.
Now your tweets are basically two tweets at once!
What you do with your extra space is completely up to you, but we recommend sharing this blog post for a start. Just saying.
Like every change that has ever happened to a social media platform in the history of ever, there are plenty of people who aren’t happy about it…even though we’ve all known it was coming since Twitter announced it months ago.
We, too, are fans of the way that Twitter’s space restrictions almost force users to use their words more carefully.
280 characters may be twice the length, but it’s still a character restriction. We hope the 280 maximum continues to prevent Twitter from filling up with those annoying “copy and paste this message” things that periodically flood that other big social network.
What do you think of the increased Twitter character limit? Do you love it or hate it?