Twitter’s 280 characters are here and we do not know what to feel

So Twitter has rolled out its 280 character format to all users and well, we are not sure what to feel.

You see, Twitter used to be about brevity, getting to the point and what you saw, you read in a few seconds and made a decision.

Now you have to go through a whole Alex Magaisa or Prof Jonathan Moyo in 280 characters having a go at each other or against anyone else.

It’s weird because even the shape of Twitter has changed but after testing it, we suppose that they have seen something and they like it.

Our editor got over-excited here and used all 280 characters on Twitter

Except Twitter said this in a blog post titled Tweeting Made Easier:

We – and many of you – were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character Tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space. But that didn’t happen. Only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters.

Yep for 5% of people they made the huge change which makes very little sense but they do argue:

In addition to more Tweeting, people who had more room to Tweet received more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions), got more followers, and spent more time on Twitter. People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall.

We suppose it might mean people stay on twitter for longer.

3-mob.com uses Twitter a lot as part of its digital strategy both for directing traffic to our website and also live engagement among other things.

We have already started looking at ways to make an engaging content strategy on Twitter and if the result is more action, power to them.

It is change. We weirded out. But we will be OK.