When marketing for local businesses, or even major clients and campaigns, it can be hard to fit everything you want to say into Twitter’s 140 character limit. Sometimes the tweet just flows naturally and you’re precisely within those 140 characters, and other times you sit staring at the screen debating whether you should cut a few precious words or scrap the entire tweet altogether. Personally, it’s something I struggle with at least 45% of the time, so it’s likely plenty of you often find yourselves in similar quandaries too. Fortunately for us, Twitter has decided to test out increasing the 140 character limit to 280 characters. There have been changes made in the past to what impacts character count, but this proposed increase would be a complete game changer. Oh yes, the things we could all do with an extra 140 characters. But, don’t get too excited yet because this increase is first being tested on a small group to determine its usefulness.
Twitter is avoiding a complete roll out of the increase due to the fact that the current character limit does not impact all markets. Twitter users from Japan and China often have characters to spare because they can convey in one character what would take us six or seven. Changing the limit to 280 is a change aimed at benefitting users who speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. According to their findings, Twitter stated that the current character limit is a huge frustration for those tweeting in English, and continued that they saw more users engaging on the platform when they didn’t have to condense their thoughts into 140 characters.
While Twitter is all about short and to the point messages, the key is to get more users interacting on the web. Increasing the character count not only relieves current frustrations, but also frees up room for more detailed expression. The jury is still out on whether this increase will turn into a complete implementation, but it’s certainly something we’ll be keeping our eye on. Whether you’re on board with this change or not, Twitter ultimately seems quite hopeful about it. Stay tuned!