Maybe Twitter was onto something after all when it doubled its signature 140-character limit.
In November, Twitter expanded the length allowed for tweets to 280 characters from the original 140 characters. When it happened, the company was roundly criticized and mocked, either for the silliness of the whole exercise or out of concern that Twitter wasn’t focused on more important issues like tamping down on harassment. The event became such a topic of conversation that #Twitter280 began trending.
SocialFlow’s chart shows Twitter users like longer tweets.
Now, early data indicates the change is being well received after all.
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“If a tweet can hook you in the first few words, we’ll read all of it,” said Frank Spieser, co-founder of the social media analysis firm SocialFlow, which conducted a study of Twitter’s usage. In a nutshell, he found: “We want to read longer tweets.”
SocialFlow tracked approximately 30,000 thousand tweets between Nov. 29 and Dec. 6 and found tweets longer than 140 characters were being retweeted 26.52 times on average, compared to 13.71 times for shorter ones. It also discovered that longer tweets were being liked on average 50.28 times, compared to 29.96 times for shorter tweets.
The findings come about a month after the social network officially decided to let its 330 million users tweet up to 280 characters after a “successful” trial run with a select group of users in September. Now, it appears many Twitter users, including President Donald Trump, are regularly using long tweets to get their messages out.
A Twitter spokeswoman reached for comment on Friday declined to comment beyond the company’s November blog post when the 280-character limit was broadly released. The company said then its internal data indicated people who wrote longer tweets were retweeted more often, got more followers and generally “spent more time on Twitter.”
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