Home Technology Twitter and Snapchat adopting new looks to gain more users

Twitter and Snapchat adopting new looks to gain more users

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A pair of struggling social- media darlings have decided they need to take on new looks if they want to prosper. Twitter is rolling out a 280-character limit for nearly all its users, abandoning its iconic 140-character limit for tweets.

November 8, 2017: A pair of struggling social- media darlings have decided they need to take on new looks if they want to prosper.

Twitter is rolling out a 280-character limit for nearly all its users, abandoning its iconic 140-character limit for tweets. And Snapchat, long an app popular with young people, will undergo a revamp to make itself easier to use, in the hopes it can attract a wider audience.

Both companies announced the moves Tuesday as they look for ways to expand beyond their passionate but slow-growing fan bases. At the end of the third quarter, Twitter had 330 million monthly users, up just 1 percent from the second quarter. Snapchat added 4.5 million daily users in the quarter to 178 million, which amounts to a 3 percent growth.

Twitter is freeing users from the 140-character straitjacket to gain in popularity. The San Francisco company says 9 percent of tweets written in English hit the 140- character limit. People ended up spending more time editing tweets or didn’t send them out at all. The move to 280 characters was first started as a test in September.

“People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall,” said project manager Aliza Rosen in a blog post. The expansion to 280-character tweets will be extended to all users except those tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, who will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.