Twitter recently announced that they are testing a version of the social media app where the character limit is increased to 280 characters per tweet. Ever since Twitter existed, tweets have been limited to just 140 characters and for some this has been a problem as you end up trying to fit in all your thoughts within that limit.
Sometimes it’s not even possible if you’re tweeting in English. Twitter did some research and they found that a small percent of tweets written in Japanese have 140 characters (around 0.4%). However, when they took a look at Tweets in English, the number of them that have 140 characters is much higher (around 9%).
So it seems like in some languages like Japanese, you can say a lot with a few characters. Generally, around 15 characters are used per Japanese tweet while most English tweets have 34 characters. From their research, they also found out that the character limit is more of a frustration for people tweeting in English, but for those tweeting in Japanese, it’s not as big of a problem.
Due to that, Twitter has seen the need to increase the character limit of tweets. After all, if you give people more characters to type in, they should share more and probably start doing it more often as they’re not constantly frustrated.
Earlier this month, it was discovered that Twitter might be working on a feature to allow tweetstorms (chained tweets). So with this feature, you’d be able to compose a chain of related tweets and send them all at the same time. This was going to solve the character limit in a way as you’d be able to say more easily even with the character limit existing.
Now, Twitter might have seen that it might not have been the best solution, why not just go to the root of the problem which is the character limit. That doesn’t mean that the tweetstorm feature won’t come. In July, a reputable site called Recode did some math to try and figure out how many daily users Twitter has.
They had to do that because Twitter doesn’t currently reveal their exact numbers in reports to the public, just percentages of growth. So from Recode’s calculations, Twitter had an estimated 140 million daily active users in the second quarter of 2016 and in the second quarter of 2017, that number could be around 157 million daily active users.
So the social media app managed to get 17 million people to use the app daily and that’s a 12% growth. Compared to other social media apps like Instagram that now have 500 million daily active users, Twitter needs to find a way to have more people using it daily.
Of course, Twitter and Instagram are two different platforms that serve different purposes but for the company to continue existing, it needs to make sense to the investors and one way of achieving that is growing the number of people who use it monthly and importantly daily.
Anyways, back to the potential increase in the character limit of tweets, what do you think about that? Has the 140 character limit been a problem for you as a Twimbo? What other features would you like to see added to Twitter? Let us know in the comments section down below.
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