Hope you like looooong tweets.
After initially enabling Twitter Blue subscribers to share tweets up to 4,000 characters long back in February, then expanding that to 10,000 characters in April, Twitter’s now expanded this again, with Blue users now able to post 25,000 character posts in a single tweet.
We have increased NoteTweet (aka longform Tweet) limit from 10k to 25k characters. Enjoy longer NoteTweet and happy tweeting! ???? https://t.co/7ILGxLAd32
— Prachi Poddar (@imPrachiPoddar) June 20, 2023
You can tap through on the example tweet here to see what 25k characters looks like in a tweet. It’s a lot of scrolling.
In addition to this, Twitter also recently rolled out the capacity to add inline images into your long tweets, with all Twitter Blue subscribers getting access to the functionality last week.
So now, you can create blog post style content, with visuals integrated into the text, within your tweets.
Which could be good, I guess, and could lead to a habitual shift in how users engage in the app – though we don’t have any data as yet as to how Twitter users are responding to the longer ‘See more’ tweets in-stream.
Personally, I do find it a bit annoying to have to tap through on a tweet to expand it, then return to the main tweet feed once I’m done reading. It’s especially grating when it’s only, like, two extra words that you’re tapping through to read – but maybe this is just a behavioral shift, and over time, we’ll become more accustomed to having more to read in tweets.
The update aligns with Elon Musk’s vision to expand the functionality of the app, by providing a place where users can share more types of content, including long-form video and text. The idea, then, is that if Twitter can offer better monetization incentives, it could become a more central focus for more creators, which will see them share more of their original work directly in the app, as opposed to referring users off to other platforms to view it.
If Twitter can get its creator monetization program right, and incorporate payments in app, that could indeed be a valuable opportunity, but it does remain to be seen whether users actually want to consume long-form content in the app.
But that’s Elon’s grand vision, to create a platform that facilitates the full gamut of online interactions, building a whole ecosystem into the app.
In this context, it makes sense for Twitter to build more of these tools into its system, and it’ll be interesting to see whether users warm to the expanded experience, or if they look to stay more aligned to their traditional tweet feed.