Tweets are shorter despite 280-character limit
Twitter introduced the 280-character limit last year, claiming the update could give users more engagement opportunities and a higher number of followers. However, it looks like the change didn’t impact the average tweet.
Actually, tweets are shorter overall than they were before the update.
Read more: These ‘Stranger Things’ characters were supposed to die in season one
In Sept. 2017, Twitter announced that select users would have the expanded tweets, hoping to try it out with a small group of people before launching to everyone. A couple of months later, the social media site expanded the feature for everyone.
With the change, Twitter shared that people who had more room to tweet “received more engagement, got more followers and spent more time on Twitter.” Plus, they said that the “higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter.”
At the time, the company reported that only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters.
Almost a year later, not much has changed. Tech Crunch reports the 280-character limit had little impact on the length of tweets: Only 1 percent of the posts hit the limit. Not only that, but just 12 percent of tweets are longer than the previous 140-character limit.
Other numbers Twitter is sharing show that tweets are also getting shorter than they used to be. The most common length of a post is 33 characters, one character less than what they were before the change.
Another finding makes the change even weirder. Twitter noticed that users are writing with less abbreviations than before. “Text speak” is being substituted by proper words, which should help increase the length of tweets, but doesn’t.
Twitter’s findings also point out at some words whose use have increased, such as “sorry” (+31%), “please” (+54%) and “thank you” (+22%).
Other Twitter news
Twitter is reportedly removing the ‘like’ button. Founder Jack Dorsey announced the news during a company event, sharing that he “was not a fan of the heart-shaped button,” and that the company had plans of removing it “soon.”
Created back in 2015, the ‘like’ button served as a replacement to a similar-function, the ‘favorite’ button. Both functions shared the same purpose, where users can still interact with a tweet but not have it shown as publicly as retweeting or commenting.
Plus, the platform recently lost a whopping 9 million users in an ongoing effort to wipe out bots and spam on the platform while making more money in the long run.
