Twitterati, don’t be afraid of emojis!

We need to take extreme care while tweeting, especially because one only gets 280 characters to play with. The major limitation pops up when emojis are used in the tweets. It has been observed that unlike the usual yellow emojis, other symbols take up many more characters, reducing the number of characters that can be used for typing the message.

In a recent announcement, Twitter has said that it’s changing the way it counts emojis so that they’re all counted equally, as two characters. The announcement means that instead of some emojis using two characters and others like the flag of a country using up to 14 characters, all will now use two characters only. Before the update, while an emoji on its own was taking two characters, adding a skin tone modifier added two more, and adding a gender on top of that increased it to nine characters in total.

The best thing about the new addition is that in the previous system, people were compelled to use the default colours and genders to stay within Twitter’s character count limit despite the availability of inclusive emojis. One can now use whichever gender or skin tone he/she likes, without it having any impact on the length of your tweet.