Over the next couple of days, the character limit for all Twitter users is being double to 280, the company announced on Tuesday. The move was made, in part, to increase Twitter use in countries where language made a 140 character limit difficult. In U.S. tests, only 9% of tweets exceeded 140 characters.
From Twitter:
“Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer. This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send Tweets faster than before. You can see this happening in the graph below.”