Photos and links will no longer count towards Twitter’s 140 character limit, as the social network looks to give its users more room to tweet, according to a new report.
According to Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, Twitter will make the update in the next two weeks.
Links currently take up to 23 characters of a tweet, reducing the space available to users for their own writing when sharing other online content.
Twitter will stop counting photos and links in a 140-character limit https://t.co/r2NL5n2CA6 pic.twitter.com/BITrSjsQ0f
— Bloomberg (@business) May 16, 2016
The news comes after a series of tweaks to Twitter as the company tries to boost engagement.
In February, the company updated to an algorithmic timeline that no longer displayed tweets in chronological order.
Back in January this year, Twitter said it was considering ditching its 140-character limit in tweets, expanding it to a whopping 10,000 characters.
The firm is aiming to appeal to a wider audience amid growing competition from upstarts such as Instagram and Snapchat. If Twitter allowed tweets of up to 10,000 characters, it could produce 1,700-word messages.
Chief executive officer Jack Dorsey has said the company was looking for ways for users to post longer pieces of text on Twitter, noting that many often post screenshots of longer articles.
The company removed the 140-character limit in direct messages last year.
The 140-character limit was originally added to make tweets fit into a text message. When the company launched in 2006, before smartphones were available, many users typed their tweets as texts before posting them.
Dorsey has since described the limit as a “beautiful constraint” that “inspires creativity and brevity”.
However, the company has struggled to attract new users and has seen its share price decline by more than 70% over the past year.
Twitter hasn’t made a profit since launching in 2006. In comparison Facebook has 1.5 billion users and made £579m between July and September last year.
Jack Dorsey, who returned to the company last July, helped create Twitter in 2006. He imposed a 140-character limit on messages so the service would be easy to use on mobile phones that could only deal with 160 character texts at that time. Those limits disappeared after smartphones took off and allowed people to use other internet messaging services, making Twitter’s restrictions look increasingly out of date.