Twitter is turning on longer 280-character tweets for everyone (TWTR)

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• Twitter is turning on 280-character tweets for everyone.
• The change comes after Twitter has tested the expanded limit with a subset of its users for the past several weeks.
• Twitter says that users with the 280-character limit spend more time on the service and receive more engagement from their longer tweets.

After testing longer tweets with some people since late September, Twitter is giving the feature to everyone.

All Twitter users except those tweeting in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages will now be able to tweet up to 280 characters, the company said Tuesday in a blog post.

Twitter decided to permanently expand its iconic 140-character restraint after users with access to the test spent more time on the platform and received more engagement, like retweets and likes, from their longer tweets.

"During the first few days of the test many people Tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel, but soon after behavior normalized," wrote Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen in the blog post. "We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained."

While 9% of English tweets have "historically" hit Twitter's 180-character limit, only 1% of tweets with access 280 characters hit the limit, according to Rosen. She added that only 2% of tweets from accounts with access to the test included over 190 characters — an indication that the additional characters won't be used that heavily. 

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean-speaking users aren't getting access to the expanded limit because "cramming is not an issue in these languages," per Twitter.

When Twitter first turned on the 280-character test for a subset of its users, the new limit was quickly used in less informative and more troll-like ways. Take this tweet from the official Kansas City Chiefs account:

Luckily, Twitter doesn't expect the new character limit to be used in such silly ways after the initial buzz wears off.

"We expect to see some of this novelty effect spike again with this week’s launch and expect it to resume to normal behavior soon after," Rosen wrote.

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