One hundred forty characters is about the length of a headline. To get a sense of what that feels like, type up a message in the "What are you doing?" box. As you type, the Twitter website counts down your remaining characters (look just above the box where you're typing). If you're on a phone, remember to use just 140 of the 160 characters in your outgoing texts.
As you can see here, 140 characters is approximately a sentence, maybe two. Bear in mind that your 140 characters includes spaces.
By the way, posts on Twitter are capped at 140 characters for a reason: text messages on your phone are limited to just 160 characters. Twitter takes that base and reserves 20 characters for usernames, leaving you with a tidy 140.
Get The Twitter Book now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
