Twitter on Tuesday increased the character limits for tweets from 140 to 280 characters. The launch of the feature follows trials with a small group of users in September. Users will also see a circle instead of the numerical count they used to see in the past. The circle will fill up gradually and turn red once your cross 280 characters.

This is the biggest change of policy for Twitter in its 11 years of existence and changes how the social network works. It was previously known for imposing brevity on its users due to the 140 character limit. By doubling the character count, the company is allowing more space for users to express themselves.

While the decision was expected to impact user engagement negatively, the increased character count seems to be a positive development, according to the results of the September trials.

“In addition to more Tweeting, people who had more room to Tweet received more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions), got more followers, and spent more time on Twitter. People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall,” Aliza Rozen, product manager, Twitter said in her blog post announcing the change.

The massive change in policy seems to be Twitter’s effort at gaining more users and making usage easy for existing users. The social network currently has 330 million active users, which fades in comparison to Instagram’s 800 million users and Facebook’s 2 billion users.

The change in policy cited different kinds of reactions from Twitter users.

Some users were happy they would be able to express themselves more freely:

Others were not so impressed with the change and lamented their Twitter timelines would be full of 280 character tweets.


Others tried to be funny using the new character limit.


The new feature, it seems, hasn’t been rolled out to all users. Some users seem to be still waiting for it.

The ones who have received it, liked the new circle based indicator, which makes tweets more casual than the numerical indicator.


The new limit is also setting off trends. Many users used the new limit to send out tweets to their girlfriends, friends and family.

The increased character limit will apply for all languages except Japanese, Korean and Chinese. The company doesn’t plan to increase the limit for these languages.

Before the limit was increased the only way a person could send a big tweet would be to send a series of tweets and mark them numerically. One person who did this frequently was President Donald Trump. That might end with the new character limit.

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