Longer tweets get higher engagement (TWTR)

BI Intelligence

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Tweets longer than 140 characters garner higher engagement in terms of retweets and likes than tweets under 140 characters, according to social media analytics company SocialFlow, per BuzzFeed.

The news comes shortly after Twitter rolled out 280-character limit tweets, doubling its long-standing 140-character limit, to all users in November.

SocialFlow tracked about 30,000 tweets from November 29 to December 6 of this year and found that longer tweets were retweeted about 27 times on average, compared with about 14 for shorter tweets. Additionally, longer tweets were liked 50 times on average, compared with 30 for tweets shorter than 140 characters. Longer and shorter tweets received roughly the same number of clicks.

The data could incentivize brands to be more verbose in their tweets. Brands could give more background or longer descriptions in tweets about certain products, for example — in the test group, only 5% of tweets sent by users in the were longer than 140 characters, and only 2% of tweets were longer than 190 characters. Brands should also focus on refining the beginning of longer tweets — if a tweet can hook users in the first few words, they’ll read all of it, according to SocialFlow co-founder Frank Speiser, per CNET.

Not all Twitter users will embrace longer tweets, but that doesn’t mean they'll flee the platform. Long-time users accustomed to the brevity of Twitter may become frustrated if more tweets over 140 characters begin populating their feeds, as it may become more difficult to consume the same amount of information in a set period of time. However, Twitter’s user base is already established with prominent brands, thought leaders, and publishers — it counted 330 million monthly users in Q3 2017. Additionally, other prominent social platforms like Facebook and Snap are not direct substitutes for Twitter, meaning longer tweets may not hurt the platform's user retention.

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