Twitter’s decision to do away with the 140-character limit a month ago seems to have struck the right chord with the users as early data suggests that people are liking and retweeting the longer tweets at a rate approximately double that of their shorter counterparts. The data seem to put to rest the theory that longer tweets might tax the attention spans of people used to reading those composed of no more than 140 characters, BuzzFeed News reported on Friday. After running a successful trial with few users, Twitter finally rolled out its new 280-character limit for all users in November. And it seems Twitter did something that worked. BuzzFeed News obtained the data from the a publishing tool SocialFlow which reviewed tens of thousands of tweets published between November 29 and December 6, analysing clicks, retweets, and likes.
Tweets above 140 characters are being retweeted 26.52 times on average compared with 13.71 times for tweets of 140 characters and below, the findings showed. Longer tweets are being liked — again on average — 50.28 times compared with 29.96 times for shorter tweets, according to the analysis.
