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| The new Miss Universe, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, sent a tweet (left) to a Facebook post (right), which received more than a half-million “likes.” Twitter/Facebook |
Mr. Dorsey was making a point with the awkward screenshot. What if the text of his letter could fit into a tweet? It could be searched and highlighted by users, he wrote, in a soft defense of why Twitter might do the unthinkable: expanding the character limit up to 10,000.
But Mr. Dorsey’s act of posting the long response on Twitter made a less explicit point: This coming change is also about keeping content under the Twitter roof. Thousands of people were forced to stay on Twitter or travel to the site to read his note.
By imposing the 140-character limit for most of Twitter’s nine-year existence, the service has pressured users to write succinctly, which created the quirky conversational culture that has come to define the social-media wire. But it also forced users away from the service when they wanted to pen or read a longer take.
Last month, for example, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted a link to a 4,000-character rebuttal to fellow presidential hopeful Donald Trump on her own site and also posted it on Medium, the long-form publishing platform started by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Ms. Clinton has over 5 million Twitter followers, who were forced to read the essay on Medium.
In another example last month, the new Miss Universe, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, tweeted a link to her half-million followers. It directed people to Facebook, where she wrote a thank you letter after controversially winning the crown. That post received more than 500,000 “likes.
Facebook FB +0.89%has loosened the belt on character restrictions over the years, expanding it from 160 characters to 420 in March 2009, then to 5,000 a few years later. Today, users can pontificate up to 63,206 characters — about the size of 451.5 tweets — which has made it a viable alternative for people to sound off. That last increase in November 2011 perhaps set the stage for Facebook’s Instant Articles launched last year, which allows publishers like the Washington Post to host entire articles on Facebook.Critics were quick to dismiss Twitter’s move. But as Fortune’s Mathew Ingram pointed out in his column on Tuesday, Twitter’s planned character increase could converge into a “war of platforms” as each service vies to house more content. The triumphant ones will capture a bigger and more active audience that comes back.
Twitter’s number-one priority is user growth and retention. Housing more content, in theory, could keep people on its site and lure newbies who click on Twitter links within news stories or in Google’s search results. Once on Twitter, they may be served an ad, and if the company does it right, be enticed to sign up.
While this change is unlikely to be the silver bullet that reignites user growth, it may also help simplify what is still an arcane service to many. Most casual users won’t have the need–or will–to exhaust Twitter’s forthcoming bounty of 10,000-characters. They may, however, feel less frustrated by trying to keep within the confines of 140.
The average tweet length is about 67.9 characters, according to an analysis of a million tweets sent on Jan. 3, 2012, on Twitter’s desktop application conducted by Isaac Hepworth, who was a Twitter engineer at the time.
The average tweet length is about 67.9 characters, according to an analysis of a million tweets in 2012 by Isaac Hepworth, a Twitter engineer at the time. The analysis also shows a sharp rise at the 140-character mark, suggesting users are cramming as much as they can into a single tweet. Isaac Hepworth
Mr. Hepworth’s chart shows a swell at around 20 characters, which he attributes to when people post just a photo or a URL link. The chart also shows a sharp rise at the 140-character mark. Mr. Hepworth, who left Twitter last year, said Wednesday in a direct message on Twitter: “My hypothesis at the time was that this comes about because people will often hit more than 140 characters when they first draft a tweet, and then trim it down bit by bit until it will fit.”
So why didn’t Twitter make this change sooner? Former employees have said the company has discussed boosting the character limit for years. Some have argued that it took the caliber of a founder like Mr. Dorsey, who returned in July, to make such a fundamental change to the product. Twitter is aiming to announce the character expansion by the end of March.
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