Twitter won’t count username in character limit for tweets anymore

“Remember how we told you we were working on ways to let you to express more with 140 characters?” Twitter product manager Sasank Reddy yesterday said in an online post. “Now, when you reply to someone or a group, those @usernames won’t count toward your tweet’s 140 characters.”

Providing more room in tweets is seen as a way to encourage more use and sharing of pictures, videos and links. The move is part of a push by Twitter to increase its user base and engagement, which have sputtered to the chagrin of investors.

“Our work isn’t finished,” Reddy said. “We’ll continue to think about how we can improve conversations and make Twitter easier to use.” Twitter faces competition from Facebook and Instagram, and a trend of people opting to share content in video or picture formats instead of text. Twitter has over 300 million users, but growth has slowed down for the company.

Twitter had earlier relaxed the 140 character limit from direct messages, and instead extended it to 10,000 characters.