Proving the old adage ‘less is more’, it seems Twitter’s recent move to fling open the gates of character limits has fallen flat with users.

Muted movements

Since allowing tweets to extend to 280 characters in November, new data shows less that 5% of tweets now stray beyond the classic 140-character limit.

To be fair, it’s still early days, and advertisers can’t just jump on the stretched-out character limit just yet.

At the moment, brands can post organic tweets up to 280-characters in length, and publish these as Promoted Tweets. Full support for 280-character ads will come in early 2018.

Short stop

Still, the new character limit might not be the magic bullet some pundits (and Twitter execs) were hoping for.

Since rolling out, the new character limits have been used in a variety of creative ways, including games and the first ever instance of Twitter chess. But not much banter.

Stay tuned to see if longer tweets translate into better engagement for marketers.

Have you used the extended Twitter character limit yet? Why, why not?