Twitter Rolls Out 280 Character Limit in Canada and Worldwide

Twitter has rolled out its new 280 character limit worldwide, in a full global expansion of the feature, which first debuted to a limited group of beta testers back in September.

According to the social network, when users “needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often,” but added abuse did not run rampant, as “people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained.”

Twitter says historically 9% of tweets in English hit the character limit, but after expanding to 280 for beta testers, the number dropped to 1%.

Nov 7 280 Launch Chart png img fullhd medium

According to Twitter: On this graph, there is a small bump in the red line (which represents the group with 280 characters) at 140 because these people were also using older Twitter clients which didn’t have the ability to send longer Tweets, so they continued to hit the 140 character limit. This graph is for English-only Tweets.

With the new 280 character limit, Twitter says only 5% of tweets were sent longer than 140 characters, while only 2% were over 190 characters. So in other words, although more characters were available, people still kept tweets in English short and sweet.

For now, tweets in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will retain the original 140 character limit.

Twitter concluded in a blog post, “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.”

Twitter.com now supports 280 characters and now a circle progress indicator shows how many characters remain, but it will turn into a number when 20 characters remain.

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