Twitter Expands to 280 Characters

Twitter has made its most pronounced change in their chequered history: expanding itself from 140 to 280 characters.

In other words, you don’t need associated apps to help you tweet in more than 140 characters anymore. Twitter itself offers you that scope. According to company officials, it had run test to check how comfortable people are with the existing quota of 140 characters. In their surveys, they found that people were left editing their lines and thoughts to fit into the required number of characters.

What’s worse, many of them abandoned their tweets because they could not encapsulate their entire expression within 140 characters. Even I can remember several times when I let go off a tweet and instead used Facebook to voice my opinion. Some ideas are better written in full, without editing. Facebook offered that option. Now, Twitter is playing catch-up.

However, there are some languages like Japanese, Chinese and Korean where Twitter thinks that people can make do with the previous 140 characters. As a result, Twitter is not expanding its doors to make room for these languages. With English, the most popular one on this micro-blogging site, 280 is the new 140.
For digital marketers, this can be excellent news, except that people may shy away from having longer marketing pitches on their timelines. If you look around this platform after the change came into being, many are already complaining about expanded timelines! If you were feeling ecstatic about the added 140 characters that you can optimize for marketing, take a step back and reflect carefully about how you are going to make use of an expanded tweet.

This is probably Twitter’s last gamble to stem the steady outflow of subscribers. Let’s find out whether it works!