The tweet sizes on your timeline are about to be doubled. Twitter announced that it has started testing 280-character tweets limit, which is a double increase over the 140-character limit.
One of the main reasons why Twitter is doing this is to help users be more expressive, should they want to. In their blog post, the company said that “Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English.”
“When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting — which is awesome,” Twitter said in their blog post. Twitter goes on to add that about 9 percent of all tweets today are exactly 140 characters. This shows Twitter (and us) that users are more than often having to edit their initial thoughts to get under the 140-character limit.
Twitter now hopes to ease the burden on its users with this limit being raised to 280-characters. This is especially true for other languages in what Twitter said “languages impacted by cramming.” The company has considered expanding the tweet length for many years now.
