According to microblogging site Twitter, users are starting to tweet more, but are not using the full quota of characters since the company upped the limit to 280 characters.
CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey has recently revealed that the enhanced limit hasn’t changed the length of the tweets users are sending, but it has led to a greater level of engagement. Dorsey explained that since the change back in November 2017, he and the company have been analysing whether or not the average tweet length would increase, and it turns out that it hasn’t.
He added that there is less abandonment of tweets and the level of engagement with these tweets has risen, leading to a greater number of likes, retweets and mentions. This further leads to users becoming more connected with more people gaining followers and following more accounts in the process.
Twitter released a rather vague graph a few months ago not too long after the introduction of the 280 character limit, that shows that even after the character limit was increased, the typical length of tweets has remained similar and this is actually fewer than 50 characters, highlighting Dorsey’s point. It is likely that only the tweets that are likely to be in and around the 140 character limit that have increased.
The graph also demonstrated that 9% of users were hitting the character limit when it was still at 140, but now it has been extended, this figure has dropped to just 1%.
In other news for the company, it recently recorded a profitable quarter for the first time. The company is almost 12 years old, and has been a public company for the last four years, but has finally had its first profitable quarter. The social site announced a $91m (£65.4m) profit during the final quarter of last year. This compares to the same quarter of 2016, where the company reported a loss of $167m (£120m). Revenue was also up by 2% year on year.
However, despite this, the site lost one million US monthly users in the last quarter, the second time in a year that the number of US users has dipped. Globally, this was counteracted by more users signing up to the site from other parts of the world, meaning that Twitter’s overall monthly user base remained at around 330 million.
Twitter’s monthly user numbers are still relatively small compared to rival platforms, with Instagram reporting 800 million monthly active users.
With Twitter finally seeing profit, and revenue now going in the right direction, could this finally be the kickstart the company is desperate for?
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