RESEARCH ARTICLE Quantifying Regional Differences in the Length of Twitter Messages

The increasing usage of social media for conversations, together with the availability of its data to researchers, provides an opportunity to study human conversations on a large scale. Twitter, which allows its users to post messages of up to a limit of 140 characters, is one such social media. Previous studies of utterances in books, movies and Twitter have shown that most of these utterances, when transcribed, are much shorter than 140 charac-ters. Furthermore, the median length of Twittermessages was found to vary across US states. Here, we investigate whether the length of Twittermessages varies across different regions in the UK. We find that the median message length, depending on grouping, can dif-fer by up to 2 characters