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Let's revisit why Twitter imposed the 140 character limit:

We like to keep it short and sweet! It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people's names, and the other 140 are all yours!

In SMS, characters in Chinese must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS-2 character encoding, which leads to the maximum individual short message size of 70 16-bit characters. To account for unusually long (sur)names, 10 characters should be reserved for people's names, so I argue that Chinese microblogging services should limit posts to 60 characters because Confucius said 「六十而耳顺」.

In reality, Chinese microblogging services like Sina Weibo all have the rather lax 140 character limit inherited from Twitter. If Twitter were to beef up its character limit to let English language users convey as much information as Chinese speaking users now enjoy, I would say 300 characters is a good choice. In my experience, I can usually express the same amount of information contained in one Chinese character in about 2.5 English words (Betty can do that in two-thirds of an English word). This translates to 140 × 2.5 = 350 words in English. However, when it comes to internet languages, English has an advantage because it has contractions/abbreviations (e.g. srsly instead of seriously) and can usually do without some articles (e.g. a, the). It is worth noting that Chinese netizens often like to write in both Chinese and alphanumeric characters. Sometimes this reduces character count (OL vs 白领女性), but other times it has the opposite effect (1024 vs 顶/推). So I would wager that one can probably cram more English words in less characters if they take the shortcuts. And because 300 is spartan.

Let's revisit why Twitter imposed the 140 character limit:

We like to keep it short and sweet! It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people's names, and the other 140 are all yours!

In SMS, characters in Chinese must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS-2 character encoding, which leads to the maximum individual short message size of 70 16-bit characters. To account for unusually long (sur)names, 10 characters should be reserved for people's names, so I argue that Chinese microblogging services should limit posts to 60 characters because Confucius said 「六十而耳顺」.

In reality, Chinese microblogging services like Sina Weibo all have the rather lax 140 character limit inherited from Twitter. If Twitter were to beef up its character limit to let English language users convey as much information as Chinese speaking users now enjoy, I would say 500 characters is a good choice. The answers in this post indicate that pro translators can express 1 English word in about 1.5 Chinese characters, and this website gives the average length of an English word to be 4.5 letters, so 140 Chinese characters translate to 140 / 1.5 × (4.5 + 1) = 513 English characters (letters plus space between words). 

However, when it comes to internet languages, English has an advantage because it has contractions/abbreviations (e.g. srsly instead of seriously) and can usually do without some articles (e.g. a, the). It is worth noting that Chinese netizens often like to write in both Chinese and alphanumeric characters. Sometimes this reduces character count (OL vs 白领女性), but other times it has the opposite effect (1024 vs 顶/推). So I would wager that one can probably cram more English words in fewer characters if they take the shortcuts. Hence the 500 character approximation.

Let's revisit why Twitter imposed the 140 character limit:

We like to keep it short and sweet! It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people's names, and the other 140 are all yours!

In SMS, characters in Chinese must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS-2 character encoding, which leads to the maximum individual short message size of 70 16-bit characters. To account for unusually long (sur)names, 10 characters should be reserved for people's names, so I argue that Chinese microblogging services should limit posts to 60 characters because Confucius said 「六十而耳顺」.

In reality, Chinese microblogging services like Sina Weibo all have the rather lax 140 character limit inherited from Twitter. If Twitter were to beef up its character limit to let English language users convey as much information as Chinese speaking users now enjoy, I would say 300 characters is a good choice. In my experience, I can usually express the same amount of information contained in one Chinese character in about 2.5 English words (Betty can do that in two-thirds of an English word). This translates to 140 × 2.5 = 350 words in English. However, when it comes to internet languages, English has an advantage because it has contractions/abbreviations (e.g. srsly instead of seriously) and can usually do without some articles (e.g. a, the). It is worth noting that Chinese netizens often like to write in both Chinese and alphanumeric characters. Sometimes this reduces character count (OL vs 白领女性), but other times it has the opposite effect (1024 vs 顶/推). So I would wager that one can probably cram more English words in less characters if they take the shortcuts. And because 300 is spartan.

Let's revisit why Twitter imposed the 140 character limit:

We like to keep it short and sweet! It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people's names, and the other 140 are all yours!

In SMS, characters in Chinese must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS-2 character encoding, which leads to the maximum individual short message size of 70 16-bit characters. To account for unusually long (sur)names, 10 characters should be reserved for people's names, so I argue that Chinese microblogging services should limit posts to 60 characters because Confucius said 「六十而耳顺」.

In reality, Chinese microblogging services like Sina Weibo all have the rather lax 140 character limit inherited from Twitter. If Twitter were to beef up its character limit to let English language users convey as much information as Chinese speaking users now enjoy, I would say 300 characters is a good choice. In my experience, I can usually express the same amount of information contained in one Chinese character in about 2.5 English words (Betty can do that in two-thirds of an English word). This translates to 140 × 2.5 = 350 words in English. However, when it comes to internet languages, English has an advantage because it has contractions/abbreviations (e.g. srsly instead of seriously) and can usually do without some articles (e.g. a, the). It is worth noting that Chinese netizens often like to write in both Chinese and alphanumeric characters. Sometimes this reduces character count (OL vs 白领女性), but other times it has the opposite effect (1024 vs 顶/推). So I would wager that one can probably cram more English words in less characters if they take the shortcuts. And because 300 is spartan.

In my experience, complete sentences in English are about 1.4-1.6 times longer than they would be in Chinese. On average, there are 4-5 characters in an English word, so 140 characters translate to about 28-35 words in English, and about 18-25 words (characters) in Chinese. When it comes to internet languages, English has an advantage because it can use contractions/abbreviations or leave out some particles (or even use foreign loan words), but it is also normal to see English letters in Chinese writings (some even carry a different meaning from that in the original, e.g. OS), so I think somewhere between 20-30 Chinese characters is the best approximation.

Let's revisit why Twitter imposed the 140 character limit:

We like to keep it short and sweet! It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people's names, and the other 140 are all yours!

In SMS, characters in Chinese must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS-2 character encoding, which leads to the maximum individual short message size of 70 16-bit characters. To account for unusually long (sur)names, 10 characters should be reserved for people's names, so I argue that Chinese microblogging services should limit posts to 60 characters because Confucius said 「六十而耳顺」.

In reality, Chinese microblogging services like Sina Weibo all have the rather lax 140 character limit inherited from Twitter. If Twitter were to beef up its character limit to let English language users convey as much information as Chinese speaking users now enjoy, I would say 300 characters is a good choice. In my experience, I can usually express the same amount of information contained in one Chinese character in about 2.5 English words (Betty can do that in two-thirds of an English word). This translates to 140 × 2.5 = 350 words in English. However, when it comes to internet languages, English has an advantage because it has contractions/abbreviations (e.g. srsly instead of seriously) and can usually do without some articles (e.g. a, the). It is worth noting that Chinese netizens often like to write in both Chinese and alphanumeric characters. Sometimes this reduces character count (OL vs 白领女性), but other times it has the opposite effect (1024 vs 顶/推). So I would wager that one can probably cram more English words in less characters if they take the shortcuts. And because 300 is spartan.