Twitter had started testing the feature back in September. When the company launched the test, some users felt that Twitter would lose its brevity. Now, the company says its experiment with 280 characters shows that it has not lost its brevity and people with the new limit not always use up the whole limit. Aliza Rosen, Product Manager, Twitter writes, “Only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters. As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline.” Further, it has made tweeting easy for many users who had to spend more time editing their tweets because of the 140-character limit. According to Rosen, earlier 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit when it was 140 characters, and now with the increased character count, that number is dropped to only 1% of Tweets hitting the limit. So, since Tweets hit the character limit less often now, it is understood that people now spend less time editing their Tweets in the composer. The more characters in a tweet make it easier for people to fit their thoughts in a Tweet, and they can also send Tweets faster than before. Additionally, people who have more room to Tweet receive more engagement such as likes, and retweets, get more followers, and eventually, they spend more time on Twitter. Increasing the character limit would make tweeting easy and any information that contains more than allowed characters can be shared without breaking it. This might also help Twitter to add more users on board. As of 2017, the microblogging site has around 328 million monthly active users.
