Twitter looks to boost engagement with upped character limit (TWTR)

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Twitter announced it would begin testing 280-character tweets, a significant increase from its longstanding 140-character limit.

The new limit will be tested out on a small subset of Twitter users and will not include Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, because it's possible to convey more meaning in fewer characters in these languages.

BI Intelligence published a first take yesterday regarding the news. Here's a closer look at the most important reason for rolling out the tool — increasing user engagement.

The increased limit can bolster user engagement. A higher character limit loosens the creative restraints on users and gives them the opportunity to be more expressive. Because they can relay much more information in a single tweet, they may be inclined to post more often. Monthly user growth was flat in Q2 2017, making it especially important for Twitter to increase time spent among the users it currently has. Nonetheless, a 280-character limit is still a far cry from an unlimited character count, preventing the change from turning Twitter into a full-fledged blogging platform.
Twitter wants to redirect focus from monthly to daily active users (DAUs). Twitter first started reporting DAU growth in Q3 2016, an important metric to track because it’s the closest proxy for measuring user engagement. In Q2 2017, Twitter DAU growth modestly decelerated by two percentage points to 12% YoY growth. On the Q2 earnings conference call, CFO Anthony Noto said the company had " elevated the importance of daily active users as a key driver of overall growth, both from an audience standpoint, engagement standpoint and also from an advertising standpoint." The risk of prioritizing existing users over new users is that top-of-the-funnel, casual users may not find the new feature appealing, further isolating them from engaging on Twitter.
The last reported DAU-to-MAU ratio was 44%. While Twitter occasionally gives out the ratio of DAUs to MAUs, it no longer does so. However, the last reported metric BI Intelligence could locate was in the company’s Q3 2015 earnings transcript. Since then, commentary around the ratio was vague, with little detail beyond "relatively stable." This means that daily user engagement is likely lingering in the 45%-55% range. As a comparison, Facebook's daily engagement is over 65%.

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Examines how time spent and monthly users across major age brackets have changed in the past three years.
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