Tweets get shorter despite users getting more characters

Twelve months ago Twitter increased the character restriction on tweets from 140 characters to 280 characters.

Despite that, the length of the average tweet has marginally decreased.

Twitter has revealed the most common length of tweets remains small – with 140 characters it was 34 characters and with 280 characters it is 33 characters.

Historically, 9% of tweets hit the 140-character limit. This reflected the challenge of fitting a thought into a tweet, often resulting in editing to fit within the limit. With the expanded 280 character count, in English only about 1% of tweets hit the 280-character limit, 12% of tweets sent are longer than 140 characters and 5% of tweets sent are longer than 190 characters.

Globally, Twitter is seeing 6% of all tweets over 140 characters and 3% of tweets over 190 characters. Less work to fit thoughts into tweets and short tweets remain the norm.

Twitter has also reported the use of “please” and “thank you” in tweets has increased. There’s been a rise in the use of “please” (+54%) and “thank you” (+22%) over the past year since the limit doubled.

Abbreviations are used less. If u h8 to type words out properly u r stuck in last yr.

Twitter is seeing abbreviations such as “gr8” (-36%), “b4” (-13%), and “sry” (-5%) decline in favour of proper words like “great” (+32%), “before” (+70%), and “sorry” (+31%).

More questions and conversation. The number of tweets with a question mark “?” has increased by 30% and overall, tweets are receiving more replies.

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