How Many Characters Should a Tweet Be? We Ask the Experts

 

What if you could tweet more than 140 characters at the same time? Would you stop using screenshots to communicate? Would you never again grace the Internet with a tweetstorm? Or would relatively nothing change?

We may soon find out. According to a Recode report, Twitter is testing a product that will let users tweet beyond 140 characters. It wouldn’t be a terribly surprising move: Twitter wants to find a way to keep people engaged on its site for longer, and one way to do that is to give users more things to read. The network recently opened up Direct Messages to 10,000 characters, making it a far more effective messaging service, but also eschewing an ideal Twitter was built on: That there is beauty in brevity.

There’s a lot of talk about how this new verbosity will manifest on Twitter—it’s possible that this new, limitless Twitter will be an answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles; a way for publishers to post stories natively to the platform. Whatever the new function looks like, it’s clear that Twitter is thinking outside its original 140 character box. This constraint served Twitter well, but maybe it just isn’t enough anymore—maybe we’re going to be eased into a newer, bigger, wordier future. Maybe 140 isn’t quite the right fit anymore… so what is? Can we quantify exactly how many characters we can use to best tweet?

According to the experts… sort of yes, but mostly no. “The ideal character limit/word count is likely going to vary based on the intent of the message, the desired audience, and so on,” says Ryan Boyd, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies language and text analysis.

The perfect character count for a tweet is going to vary—Boyd explains it depends on intent and audience. Businesses tweeting should want to be get to the point, and be “punchier”—keep things around 1-2 sentences. We normals retain a little flexibility, because our motivations can vary more. It gets more complicated yet when you start talking about creator versus consumer. “There’s this whole asymmetry between tweet writer motivations and tweet reader motivations,” says Boyd. The perfect amount I want to write doesn’t necessarily correlate with the perfect amount you want to read (editors everywhere just started nodding enthusiastically).

Aside from the nonverbal cues, 'briefly shouting at a very loud party' is an apt description of Twitter.

There’s also a bonus to being brief. “Generally speaking, shorter character limits—to a point—tend to boost creativity, as people have to find clever ways to convey the same information by getting around the constraints.” But! Maybe there is a little wiggle room in there we haven’t been experiencing with those 140 characters. Boyd suggests that “socially-oriented” tweets might share traits with texting, and that they will naturally be under 160 characters (which most SMS messages are, restrictions or no). A recent study of texting habits found that while abbreviations are popular, users don’t really care about trying to be brief while texting, and that women wrote longer messages—and that tellingly, study participants sent and received messages that averaged 50.9 characters. In 2012, it was reported that the average tweet was only 28 characters as well. And Facebook posts that get the most engagement (and could therefore reasonably be deemed “the best”—whatever that even means) have fewer than 40 characters.

James W. Pennebaker, who also works at the University of Texas at Austin and is an authority on the nature of language, says we are well-equipped to bend to conversational limits. “At a very loud party, two people can have a brief, meaningful conversation made up of yelling a few things to each other plus using nonverbal cues.” Aside from the nonverbal cues, “briefly shouting at a very loud party” is an apt description of Twitter. He continues: “In the past, American Indians conveyed information with smoke signals—much less than 140 characters,” he says. “When I was a child, long distance phone calls were extremely expensive. We would have meaningful interactions in under two minutes, then later three minutes. The 140 character limit is interesting because people just know that that is all they can say in a communication. They then act accordingly.”

He says to his knowledge, there isn’t really an “ideal” character count for Internet communication. Again, it all comes back to intent. “If people are trying to be persuasive, (much) longer tweets would often be better due to the ‘Longer is Stronger’ heuristic—a bias that most people have that causes them to find longer blocks of text more compelling or reputable than shorter ones, even if the longer ones don’t actually contain any additional substance,” says Boyd.

Longer tweets aren’t only good for the argumentative among us—-they’re good for Twitter, and any platforms using Twitter analytics. More text means more data, and more data means more money (potentially at least), or at least more information for research purposes. Boyd offers the example of people using predictive Twitter analysis to study global HIV prevalence.