Twitter doubles character count starting today

Twitter has officially doubled their character count at 280 from 140 characters.

The expansion is rolling out today after a test period of the 280-character tweets that began in late September with a small group of users.

The social media company stated the expansion was available to all users in almost all 40 languages excluding Japanese, Korean or Chinese-language tweets as they can convey twice as much information in less space compared to their counterparts, so tweets will remain at 140 characters.

Twitter also added that the 140-character length wasn’t a random choice: Twitter’s founders wanted tweets to fit in a text message, which can only hold 160 characters. 140-character length wasn’t a random choice: Twitter’s founders wanted tweets to fit in a text message, which can only hold 160 characters.

This move comes after a decade of the company launch in 2006 as the company has never altered the character limit aside from the test.

The company said that during the trial period, people continued to tweet below 140 characters most of the time – after the novelty of being able to use more characters wore off. According to the company, only 5% of tweets sent from people in the 280-character test group were longer than 140 characters, and just 2% were over 190 characters.

Twitter is very popular in Kenya, let’s see how Kenyans will adapt to the new changes.