Doubling the number of Twitter characters from 140 to 280 had little impact on the duration of tweets – TechCrunch



[ad_1]

Twitter The decision to double its character count from 140 to 280 characters last year did not dramatically change the length of Twitter posts. According to new data released this morning by the company, Twitter remains a place for reflection, with only 1% of tweets reaching the limit of 280 characters and only 12% of tweets over 140 characters.

The brevity, it seems, is an integral part of Twitter – even when the space is wide, people do not use it.

Only 5% of tweets have more than 190 characters, which indicates that Twitter users have been trained for so long to keep their tweets short and they have not adapted to take advantage of the extra space they had for writing.

Meanwhile, most tweets remain very short, explains Twitter.

The most common length of a tweet when Twitter allowed 140 characters was 34 characters. Now that the limit is 280 characters, the most common length of a tweet is 33 characters. Historically, only 9% of tweets reached Twitter's 140-character limit, now 1%.

That said, doubling the number of characters has had an impact on the way people write.

He found that abbreviations are used much less than before. Instead of writing "text speaks" as "or", "ou8", "b4" and others, people are now using the appropriate words. For example, the use of abbreviations like 'gr8' is down 36%, the use of 'b4' is down 13% 'and' sry 'dropped 5%. Other words increased accordingly, including "excellent" (+ 32%), "before" (+ 70%) and "sorry" (+ 31%).

Twitter also points out that the use of "please" and "thank you" has increased over the year since the change in the number of characters, 54% and 22%, respectively. But do not take these metrics to say that the Twitter community has a gentler and softer tone. The feelings expressed on the network can not be tracked with polite words, especially when they are part of less than polite conversations, or used sarcastically, for example. You will need a real analysis of feelings for that.

Perhaps unrelated to the increase in the number of characters, Twitter found that the number of tweets with a question mark had increased by 30%, and overall, tweets were receiving more responses.

To be clear, the data concerns an English use of Twitter, but the company says that the results are consistent in the seven languages ​​analyzed.

One thing that Twitter has not measured is the use of threading, which seems to be today's most popular way of expressing longer thoughts. Threads, which are a series of connected tweets telling a longer story, seem to be more popular than ever. They also seem to take advantage of extra characters in many cases. These long tweets often announce themselves, tweeting "THREAD" at the beginning.

But Twitter has not analyzed the use of threads, nor the number of characters they contain. It is therefore difficult to know how much they were changed following the increase to 280. (We asked them if they had access to these data and will update them if they can provide it.)

As a proxy, however, the tools that help Twitter users read the discussions have seen an increase in usage in recent months. In August, for example, the Thread Reader app tweeted a graph showing the global ranking of its website rising.

[ad_2]
Source link