The #280character Question

When Twitter announced they may lift the sacrosanct 140-character limit for their tweets, the reaction was immediate. There were those who loved it. And of course, there were those that hated it. As the social media addict I definitely am, I spent most of the day monitoring the social reaction to this #280character project to figure out which way the online community was leaning. Here are a few numbers, as well as the best tweets on the topic detected by our cool new AI-powered sentiment analysis technology (try saying that three times in a row!). 

#280characters: the numbers

Since the original Twitter announcement last night, "280 characters", as a stand-alone expression or a hashtag in English, French, Italian and German, has been used a whopping 810.255 times - and counting! The number actually kept climbing as I was writing the article, so I decided to make things simple and integrate a live counter in this blog post for your convenience.

Also very interesting to look at the sentiment expressed in these hundreds of thousands of messages - over 78.4% of negative sentiment if you take away all neutral (news-oriented) posts!

240 characters twitter sentiment

Methodology: in this specific case, I tracked the #280characters
hashtag and stand-alone expression in English, French,
Italian, German, Portuguese and Spanish. 

#280characters: the most popular tweets

Getting the general sentiment picture is great, but the best part is actually going through the most popular reactions to this potential change to understand what people hate and love about that extra-characters prospect. 

Lots of users simply had a lot of fun with the whole idea. 

Some thought that Twitter should focus on improving other aspects of the platform.

But what would this new character limit mean for one of its most famous user ? 

#280characters Twitter announcement goes viral 

One thing is certain though: the #280characters announcement is making some noise. Just watch the tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey spread on social and beyond. 

virality map Jack dorsey 280 characters

And a cool GIF showing how that same tweet was shared all over the globe! 

planet dorsey twitter

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