By Christian Smith 

Twitter plans to increase the number of characters in tweets from 140 to 280 , “so every person around the world could express themselves easily in a Tweet.”

The initiative was first introduced to select users in September, but would now be available to the masses – with those written in Chinese, Japenese and Korean.

In a blog post, the company’s product manager Aliza Rosen said: “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.”

“But that didn’t happen. Only 5% of tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters.”

She wrote that: “Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages. In fact, these languages have always been able to say more with their Tweets because of the density of their writing systems.”