Twitter doubles tweet limit to 280 characters

At long last, you can now publish twice as long tweets than before.

As Twitter announced Tuesday, the new 280-character limit for tweets that it introduced as a test in September 2017 is now being rolled out to all users of the service and all languages.

In September, we launched a test that expanded the 140 character limit so every person around the world could express themselves easily in a tweet. 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.

Twitter says that during the first few days of the test many people tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel. However, soon after that behavior normalized.

Wait, won’t doubling the character limit inevitably make following conversations on Twitter harder as timelines fill up with 280-character tweets?

Not necessarily. Twitter says that during the testing period only five percent of the tweets were longer than 140 characters and only two percent were over 190 characters.

A tweet with 140 characters, at left, and with 280 characters, at right

“As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of tweets in your timeline,” claims Twitter. Tweets with an image or poll usually take up more space in the timeline than a text-only 190-character tweet.

The company added that people who had more room to tweet received more likes, retweets and @mentions, got more followers and generally spent more time on Twitter.

“People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content and Twitter overall,” says Twitter’s product manager Aliza Rosen.

Keep in mind that some third-party Twitter clients may not have the ability to send longer tweets—reach out to their developers to see if apps will get updated with the new limit.

Are you looking forward to posting longer tweets?

Let us know in the comments section.