Twitter trialling 280-character tweets

The 140-character limit for posts is what has long differentiated Twitter from other social media channels. But now, Twitter has announced that it is trialling doubling the upper character limit for tweets to 280.

In a blog post, Aliza Rosen, product manager at Twitter, explained: "We tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief constraint.

"We are excited to share this today and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next."

The thinking behind this move is that it enables people communicating in all languages to be able to say what they want via the platform without quite as much character restraint. People tweeting in English, for instance, often have to cut down their posts to fit the limit, whereas the average character usage for tweets written in Japanese is just 15.

Although only a trial for now, this move means that brands using Twitter could be able to better tailor their posts to audiences from different parts of the world. Yet by keeping the character limit relatively succinct in comparison to other social networks, Twitter should still keep the brevity factor that many users love.