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By 8 November 2017 | Categories: news

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Using Twitter as a news and reporting tool, we often lament around the office that the social media platform only affords users so much leeway thanks to its 140 character limit. A microblogging site by design, now Twitter is changing things up, officially doubling the message limit to 280 characters.

It's a change that Twitter had initially tested out with select users, but now it should be available to all people that make use of the application. According to the company, the reason for the increase stems from ensuring that users still choose to engage with the platform. Twitter's research reveals that 9% of tweets in English reach the limit, with the challenge to stay within the 140 characters often leading to multiple edits and often discarded messages, according to the company.

After testing out the platform with double the creative space, that 9% figure dropped to 1%, which should therefore lead to more users wanting to tweet more frequently, says Twitter. The company further doused any concerns that the increased limit would lead to cluttered timelines, but Twitter's findings were that only 5% of tweets were longer than 140 characters and 2% more than 190 characters.

Whether those numbers will change significantly now that all users have more creative space to type on, remains to be seen. Let us know your thoughts on the change in the comments section below.

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