Twitter has been around for a long time. Over the years, users have become accustomed to fitting their thoughts into a single 140-character Tweet. Twitter has always been known for its brevity, but early this year, the company announced that the character limit would be doubled from 140 characters to 280 characters.
The change was mainly implemented due to the fact that it was difficult to express thoughts in only 140 characters for most languages. Therefore, Twitter officially allowed 280 character Tweets as of last week for all languages except Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. These three languages were excluded from the Twitter update because they do not need the extra space to express thoughts. In fact, one study suggested that the average length of a tweet in Japanese is only 15 characters! Crazy!
With every new development in the social media world, there will always be people who are for it and some who are against it. Keep reading to see what people are saying about this new 280-character limit on Twitter!
Advantages of the 280-character limit
- Twitter believes that by increasing the character limit, the platform will become easier to use and therefore more inviting for newcomers
- People will be empowered to tweet more often and with more ease
- Twitter users can take this opportunity to be more expressive through their tweets
- More complex ideas can be shared without the need to cut down words
- Threading became a popular concept on Twitter to surpass the 140-character tweet limit. Threading refers to people replying to their own tweets to add on to their ideas. With the new 280-character limit, it is likely that threading will be eliminated, which will clear up timelines
- Twitter users have discovered that with the new character limit, they can play games such as Tetris, Chess, Connect Four, and Go through their tweets
Controversy of the 280-character limit
- Some users argue that the new character limit will make Twitter less readable due to the fact that tweets may be too long
- Issues such as abuse, harassment, and cyberbullying have been identified on Twitter, and with the new character limit, these issues may become more prominent
- Users are worried that people will express the same thoughts they always have, but unnecessarily use more words to do so
What do you think of the new character count? Only time will tell whether the new 280-character limit will be openly accepted by the Twitter population. Until then, users can enjoy the benefits of Twitter’s new character count!
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The post The Buzz around the Twitter Character Count appeared first on Quick Marketing Group.