Twitter a few days ago doubled their character limit to users from 140 to 280 to allow users “more characters to express.” Twitter says the decision was made to test 280 characters after wide and thorough research across tweets from multiple languages, hence for the meantime, it’s only available to English users.
Almost everyone has left out a crucial word or resort to “bc” or we couldn’t find the fewer words to express ourselves well, so we did not send the tweet. The character limit has been a major sticking point for Twitter and its users, but today, that changes.
The reason for the change, Twitter explains in a blog post, in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French”, and that is limiting user engagement in these regions.
“Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese. Also, in all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome”, says Aliza Rozen, product manager at Twitter.
The new tweet feature is currently being tested out to a select few. Twitter hasn’t stated when it will be rolling out the feature for all of its users. But if you cannot wait until Twitter’s official rollout, here’s a very simple workaround for you to get started tweeting in 280 characters right away.
Method One
First, download Tampermonkey extension for your browser.
Secondly, add a script from GitHub to the Tampermonkey. To do that, visit this link and then click the “raw” button, and you will be taken to an installation page. Hit “install” to install the script to Tampermonkey and you are done.
Now all you have to do is visit twitter.com and start tweeting. Don’t forget to make sure the script is running in Tampermonkey. You can check that by clicking on the Tampermonkey icon on your browser bar and see if “Twitter Cramming” is turned on.
Second Method
This is essentially a JavaScript-based bookmarking tool that lets you post longer tweets. Visit https://juliette.sh/280 and follow the instructions. It will ask you to bookmark a link, and then open TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.twitter.com). Now, click on the bookmarked link, and voila, you can now tweet in 280 characters.
