After a brief trial, Twitter is officially rolling out 280-character tweets to everyone starting today. You should be able to tweet out double the amount starting now using both Twitter’s website as well as its mobile app.
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Twitter originally test-drove the feature with a small group of users this September. During the trial, it was looking to see how the longer tweet length affected how and when people tweeted. In a blog post announcing the update, Product Manager Aliza Rosen commented that the goal was to give people more characters to tweet with while ensuring that it kept the “speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter”.
After looking at the data, it found that even people who had the 280-character limit more often than not still tweeted under 140 characters. The longer length was only used when it was needed, and according to Twitter, made people tweet more easily and more often.
Image: Twitter
“Only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters. As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline,” Rosen said in her post.
If you want to try out the new 280-character limit for yourself, you should have the ability now on Twitter’s website and mobile app. If for some reason you don’t, try refreshing the website or updating your app. The feature should be available for most soon.
Japanese, Korean and Chinese tweets will continue to have a 140-character limit because Twitter says “cramming is not an issue in these languages”.
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