Are you satisfied with 140 characters? Some people prefer the short and sweet writing style Twitter has forced upon its users for years. However, if you are not one those people good news may be in store for you. As of September 26, Casey Newton reports that Twitter has “started testing 280-character tweets…in an effort to help users be more expressive”. The idea behind this is that in many languages it is difficult to fit a full thought into only 140 characters. This is why Lisa Eadicicco reports; Twitter is rolling this out in “all languages except Korean, Chinese, and Japanese” where it is easier to express ideas with a single character. So far the response is mixed with Distinct Digital reporting that 61% of users that took their survey responded that the want tweet to stay 140 characters.
If Twitter decides to make this change permanent, it will have a huge effect on its user base. Depending on what you use Twitter for this can be a pro or a con. Twitter is hoping that this change will help bring in new users who previously felt constrained by the 140-character limit. However, this change could backfire, what many people like about the platform is its brevity. There is a certain skill set that is required to get your point across in basically a sentence. If it becomes a place where people start to share long and boring stories (like on Facebook), current users may not see the point of logging on anymore.
For people who use the platform as a news site, this can be a blessing or a curse. Expanding the character limit will allow both amateurs and professionals get more information out, faster. This takes away the need to have a thread for just one story. It could also take away the need to link to an external site just to get all of the information. This is not always good though, especially in the age of fake news. Part of the benefit for news sites that use Twitter is that to get the full story, people need to click onto their actual site. This helps gain traffic which news organizations need to keep running, especially during a time when most people use software like AdBlocker which cuts into revenue.
*Screengrab from Twitter account:@abbydrozdnyu
An extra 140 characters can be a huge benefit to marketers. As stated by AJ Agrawal, “typically when creative people are given a larger canvas, amazing things are produced.” This could help to create superior advertisements that actually stand out in a world filled with them. If more characters lead to more users, like Twitter hopes, this could also give advertisers the opportunity to target wider audiences. Of course, on the other side of things, this could be harmful for users who want fewer advertisements on their feed.
Since this is all still a test it will be interesting to see which direction Twitter decides to go in the upcoming months. Could this be just the first step in a longer plan to change what Twitter is used for? I believe that is up to the users to decide.
*Title image screengrabbed from Twitter user: @abbydrozdnyu
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