While its Western counterpart, Twitter, dithers on when to do the same, Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei has announced that the micro-blogging service will abolish its 140-character limit on January 28, raising the limit to 2,000 characters.

The restriction will first be lifted for Weibo’s “senior users”. A month later, the character limit will be lifted for all of its 200 million users. Wang explained that posts exceeding the traditional 140-character limit will continue to appear as they currently do, but readers will be able to continue to read the remaining text after clicking on a link.

With mounting competition from social media platforms, Twitter has been under pressure to abolish the character limit in its tweets but has yet to make a decision. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that abolishing the character limit would greatly benefit Twitter users. “We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it,” said Dorsey. “What if that… was actually text? Text that could be searched, text that could be highlighted - that’s more utility and power.”

Weibo has faced similar competition from social media platforms like WeChat that cut down on the “spamming” of content. However, Weibo also has a powerful advantage as Twitter is blocked in China.

One of the key differences between the two platforms, is the language limitations of 140-characters. In English, 140-characters only allows for a short summary, limiting the effectiveness of Twitter. However, characters written in Chinese are each unique words. As a result, despite the character limit, Weibo posts written in Chinese can cover a lot more ground.

This of course raises the question of whether or not there’s actually a market for Weibo posts that exceed the current character limit. According to a Weibo spokesperson interviewed by the South China Morning Post, Weibo’s big data shows that only about 10 percent of all posts surpass the current character limit.