I spent forty minutes at Ovation on Sunday reading brand tweets on purpose, which is something I do every few months to remind myself why I have a job. An airline. A bank. Two cereals. A mattress company that has clearly been told by somebody to be funny.
Twitter doubled the character limit more than two years ago. I went in genuinely curious about what brands had done with all that room.
What they had done was add a second sentence to the first one.
The mattress tweet ran 271 characters and said nothing that 140 could not have said worse. The airline spent its extra space on a disclaimer. The bank spent its on a hashtag, a link, and the phrase we are here for you.
Constraint was never what made brands boring, and removing it was never going to make them interesting.
Here is the part that gets lost. The old limit did brands an enormous favor for eleven years. It made the bad option physically impossible. You could not fit legal's preferred language, the full registered product name, the campaign hashtag, and a benefit statement into 140 characters, so somebody had to decide what mattered most. That decision was strategy, performed under duress, by people who would not otherwise have performed it.
Give those same people 280 and legal gets its clause back. The product name returns to its full form. Nothing gets cut, because nothing has to be.
The brands that are good at this did not improve when the limit moved, because they were never fighting the limit. Wendy's is funny in nine words. Merriam-Webster is arch in twelve. Oatly writes like someone who has already decided the reader is smart. None of that depends on room. It depends on having a point of view and an approval chain short enough to let the point of view survive contact with the building.
That second thing is the actual constraint, and no platform update touches it. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The tweet that arrives boring did not start boring. It started as one sharp line from a twenty-six-year-old social manager, and then it passed through four people who each added the word they were personally responsible for.
The tweet that arrives boring did not start boring.
So the honest audit is not about length. Pull your last thirty posts, delete every word that exists to protect someone internally, and see what is left. If it still fits in 140, you never needed 280.
At karaoke on Thursday the host, who calls everyone baby, cut a man off at four minutes because the list was long and the night was not. The version he sang was better than the version he wanted to sing. Nobody has ever told a brand no like that.