Why does twitter limit 140 characters

Marketers have adapted to become fast-reacting engines, churning out content within seconds. Gone are the days when social media messages need to be planned out days or weeks in advance. Tide quickly took advantage of this moment to advertise their Tide Plus ColorGuard detergent, which got an impressive amount of traction.

With just characters, Twitter forces us to tell our stories well. Marketers have learned to become quick, effective communicators, identifying the main point of the message and how to get that across in interesting ways. Marketers are also excellent curators. But with resources like Thesaurus. Your content is clear and concise, and thus easily digestible, sharable, and ultimately more engaging. And if you add a hashtag or graphic to it, it becomes even more engaging.

The unique differentiators of social media platforms help you define and test your content strategies. Now texts are unlimited. Also, we realize that isn't fair—there are differences between languages. We're testing the limits.

Hello ! Tech critics seemed more sanguine. Some users questioned why the company was doing anything other than addressing its ongoing problem with user harassment.

So here are seven questions about the hefty tweets—and a first attempt at answering them. Since it went public in late , Twitter has basically never found a firm financial footing. The number of Americans who log on to Twitter every month stayed flat for years—and then, this summer, it began to decline. For years, Twitter dealt with the crisis of its stalling user numbers by wringing more revenue out of the same number of people by selling better-targeted ads.

Now that project has also slowed. The company has never turned a profit. Once, analysts hoped Twitter would be another Facebook. No one would confuse the companies now.

What do characters have to do with money? Twitter seems to hope that enlivening the service—and dropping one of its trademark constraints—will bring users back to the service. In fact, it explicitly says as much. The average English-language tweet is 34 characters, they say; the average Japanese-language tweet is only There are specific reasons for this: As a language, Japanese requires many fewer characters per thought ; some nouns can be expressed in only one symbol.

If you are a Twitter executive, board member, or long-suffering investor, that does indeed sound awesome. Critics called for it to double its character limit as early as It was always unclear if this was because he revered Twitter or because he was never sure how it worked.

It also expanded tweets by not counting media attachments against the character limit. Others have gone further — Twitter clone Mastodon launched with character messages. Still, super-sized tweets are likely to change the nature of the network as more people gain access to them, and in unpredictable ways.

What new kinds of jokes and memes are possible at characters that were not possible at ? Will characters allow for just enough nuance and diplomacy that we may be able to avert global thermonuclear war? Most Twitter applications should already be able to show longer tweets, thanks to changes that the company introduced to its API last year. It will count down from until you run out of room.

We are excited to share this today, and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next. This is a small change, but a big move for us. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!

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