Twitter Announces Longer Tweets
Twitter announced that users are now able to write longer Tweets. The URLs for photos, videos, GIFS, polls and Tweet quotes will not count as part of the 140-character limit. The update to the social media channel is rolling out to all users of the social media app on both desktop and mobile app versions.
Twitter is famous for its unique and super short character count limit in posts. Users had to compose all posts, called Tweets, in 140 characters or less. This limit included all hashtags and URLs. Formerly, media such as images, videos, and GIFS used up a portion of each tweet’s 140-character limit because they liked to a URL. Now these are excluded from the character count and users have at least a little more room to express themselves. Links pasted into a Tweet are still counted against the 140-character limit as they always have been.
Twitter announced the change with a Tweet, of course!
Another new feature is that users can re-Tweet themselves – just in case you want to say something twice! This gives Twitter users 280 characters for a single Tweet (140 for the re-Tweet on top of the 140 characters for the original.)
Still, 140 characters is not much space to write in. Pinterest allows up to 500 characters in a description! Facebook and Instagram allow 60,000 and 2,200 characters respectively!