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Twitter’s doubling of character count fromJoin

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280 had little impact on length of tweets
Sarah Perez
@sarahintampa / 6:51 AM PDT • October 30, 2018
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Twitter’s decision to double its character count from 140 to 280 characters last year hasn’t dramatically changed the length
of Twitter posts. According to new data released by the company this morning, Twitter is still a place for briefer thoughts,
with only 1% of tweets hitting the 280-character limit, and only 12% of tweets longer than 140 characters.

Brevity, it seems, is baked into Twitter – even when given expanded space, people aren’t using it.

Only 5% of tweets are longer than 190 characters, indicating that Twitter users have been for so long trained to keep their
tweets short, they haven’t adapted to take advantage of the extra room to write.

Meanwhile, most tweets continue to be very short, Twitter says.

The most common length of a tweet back when Twitter only allowed 140 characters was 34 characters. Now that the limit
is 280 characters, the most common length of a tweet is 33 characters. Historically, only 9% of tweets hit Twitter’s 140-
character limit, now it’s 1%.

That said, Twitter did see some impact from the doubling of character count in terms of how people write.

It found that abbreviations are used much less than before. Instead of writing in “text speak” like “u r,” “u8,” “b4” and
others, people are now using proper words. For example, the use of abbreviations like “gr8” is down by 36%, use of “b4″ is
down by 13%,” and “sry” has dropped 5%. Other words have increased as result, including “great” (+32%), “before”
(+70%) and “sorry” (+31%).

Twitter also points out that the use of “please” and “thank you” have increased over the year since the character count
change, by 54% and 22%, respectively. But don’t take those metrics to mean that Twitter’s community itself has a kinder,
gentler tone. Sentiment expressed on the network can’t be tracked by use of polite words alone – especially when they’re a
part of less than polite conversations, or used sarcastically, for example. You’d need real sentiment analysis for that.

Perhaps unrelated to character count increases, Twitter found that the number of tweets with a question mark have
increased by 30%, and overall, tweets are receiving more replies.

To be clear, the data is for English use of Twitter, but the company says the findings are consistent across the seven
languages analyzed.

One thing Twitter

Building didn’t measure
a startup was the
or looking foruse of threading,
your next deal?which
Weseems to becovered.
have you the more popular way today of expressing
longer thoughts. Threads, which are connected series of tweets telling a longer story, seem to be more popular than ever
before. They also appear to take advantage of the extra characters, in many cases. These longform tweets often even
announce themselves, by tweeting “THREAD” at their start.
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But Twitter didn’t analyze the use of threads, or character counts within them, so it’s unclear to what extent they’ve Login
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changed following the increase to 280. (We’ve asked if they have access to this data, and will update if they can provide it.)

As a proxy, however, tools that help Twitter users read threads have seen a boost in usage in recent months. For example,
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Thread Reader App in August tweeted a chart showing its website’s global ranking climbing.

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Thread Reader App Startups
@threadreaderapp · Follow
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Vanity metric: Thread Reader website global rank on the
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9:43 AM · Aug 27, 2018

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