Twitter's iconic 140 character limit for tweets is no more. In a move that could affect which ideas you can express on the platform, the amount of scrolling you have to do on your Twitter app and the political policies set by the President of the United States, the company has today announced that 280 characters is the new standard for all users.

The change, which will roll out to all users tweeting in English and most other languages, doubles the maximum length of every tweet, but Twitter says a recent test of the new limit showed the platform will maintain its brevity.

"We — and many of you — were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character Tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space", said Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen in a blog post. "But that didn't happen".

According to data from the test, there was an initial spike in character count as users with the expanded limit enjoyed the novelty, but soon after the behaviour "normalised". Over the course of the test, only 5 per cent of tweets sent were longer than 140 characters, and only two per cent were over 190.

So why make the change in the first place? Twitter says "cramming" is an issue that affects most languages, where certain ideas are unable to be expressed in 140 characters because of the length of some words. The result is that users spend too much time trying to edit their tweets down, or abandon them altogether. Other languages, like Japanese, Korean and Chinese, don't have this problem and will keep the 140 character limit.

Twitter says that historically 9 per cent of tweets in English have hit the 140 character limit, indicating the user has probably had a hard time squeezing their thought into its constraints. During the 280 character test, only one per cent of tweets hit the limit and many tweets stayed below 100 characters, as can be seen in the graph above.

"In addition to more Tweeting, people who had more room to Tweet received more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions), got more followers, and spent more time on Twitter", Ms Rozen said.

"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".