Twitter Increases Character Limit To 280 For Most Languages
The company has been testing longer tweets since September claiming more user engagement.
Twitter has doubled their trademark 140-character limit in tweets to 280 characters. The company has been testing longer tweets since September, and have claimed that giving people more room to tweet results in more user engagement.
The story for longer tweets started a long back, and Twitter considered increasing the limit in 2016. Many users opposed it, worrying that the new limit would ruin the brevity of Twitter. But the company clarified, how the character limit impacted several users differently, depending on their language.
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Character Limit: Is Language A Barrier?
In languages like Japanese, Korean or Chinese, more can be expressed in a single character, compared to the users who use English, Spanish, Portuguese, German or French. Because of this, Twitter finally decided to increase their cap limit to 280 characters.
All Languages Not Supported
The new update of 280 characters will not be available for all languages. Since Japanese, Korean and Chinese languages don’t have the space limitation issue, Twitter will not roll out the new 280-limit for these three languages.
Criticism
Some of the users are worried that now with longer character limit, it would change the profound nature of Twitter and its age-old, short-in-hand messaging. The platform is quite popular among journalists, politicians and celebrities, but it has failed to win mass appeal like Facebook, Instagram and others.
Users are also worried that raising the limit will give abusers more room to spout.
Twitter Has Never Reported A Profit In 11 Years
Twitter came into existence in 2006 and has been operational since the last 11 years. Though the company became public in 2013, it has never reported a profit till now. This is despite the fact that Twitter enjoys a huge user base among celebrities, journalists and political figures from different parts of the world.
Twitter is hoping that this expansion of characters limit will prompt more user engagement and hopes to add more members on their platform.
May Lose Appeal
Some analysts have said that longer tweets may change the appeal of tweets and news reports, and how they are taken in at a glance. The longer tweets may lose out on this appeal, ending up as a flop.
On the other hand, several users welcomed the increased limit, and said raising the character limit was long overdue.
Brevity Issues
Many current Twitter users are worrying that the new limit would ruin the brevity of tweets. But, many people are already using the full 280 characters limit and it will soon get normalized among the users, new and current.
Over the years Twitter has changed the way people used to communicate on internet, so doubling the limit will definitely hit their revenue generation and monthly active user base.
