Last year, Twitter stopped counting media attachments and usernames towards its 140 character limit to make more room to tweet. If that wasn’t enough, Twitter is now doubling their character limit and adding a threads button that makes it all too easy to make tweetstorms. Are you ready for longer tweets and more threads?

280 CHARACTERS

You don’t have to do anything special to double the character limit on tweets. Just log into Twitter or the mobile app to take advantage of the extra character space right now. When composing a tweet, you’ll see a circle that fills up as you type. After using the first 260 characters, the circle shows how many characters remain.

Reactions to Twitter doubling the character limit are a mixed bag, but I’m excited about the extra space. I probably will never use all 280 characters, but it’s nice to have when you’re a word or two over the original 140 character limit.

NEW THREADS FEATURE

To add to that, Twitter is making it easier to create  tweetstorms, threads of connected tweets.

Just like hashtags and retweets, tweetstorms are an invention of the Twitter community. By replying to your last tweet, you can keep tweets connected and create a thread. If someone clicks one tweet in the thread, they can see the other tweets as well.

Tweetstorms are helpful for getting around Twitter’s character limit, sharing lists and adding context to our updating older tweets. They’re a form of dialogue wholely unique and exclusive to Twitter.

Twitter’s new threads button creates tweetstorms with ease. Tap compose and after drafting your first tweet, tap the plus sign in the bottom right to add another tweet. All tweets are treated equally and you can thread up to 25 tweets at a time. You can’t reorganize threaded tweets, but you can edit them before sending them off.

You can also use the old way of creating tweetstorms by replying to a previous tweet or thread and Twitter will treat it like a threaded reply. 

If you’re concerned about threads littering your timeline, don’t be. Threads with more than 2-3 tweets will be truncated with a “show this thread” button to view more. 

The Threads feature is rolling out to Twitter’s mobile apps and web right now. If you’re not seeing it yet, just give it some time.

LONGER TWITTER NAMES

Lastly, Twitter names can now be up to 50 characters long and include emojis. This is different from the character limit on Twitter usernames (@Corvida), which remains at 15 characters.

What will do you with the extra room to tweet? Excited about the new threads feature? Let me know in the comments!