Twitter to Expand 140 Character Limit
If your business is looking to attract more followers on Twitter and then a new development may help. As the social network aims to make the platform more attractive the mainstay 140 character limit could soon expand.
Quick tweets, retweets, and replies are attractive to users on Twitter, which allows them to creatively use hashtags, emoticons, and even images and video to get their point across or share information. This can be somewhat frustrating for a business who may want to include more information on a product or service or reply to a customer comment beyond the current limit.
According to Wikipedia Twitter’s current format began with its original co-founder, Jack Dorsey, who wanted to use his SMS driven cell phone to communicate with a small group. After its official launch in 2006 the micro-blogging social network now has over 300 million active users.
Original sketch for Twitter, previously known as “twttr.” Photo courtesy Jack Dorsey, Flickr
The expanded character limit would no longer be counting the links and user names in the character count. This could allow your business to share more information on a blog article, image, video, ect.. Currently Twitter has enabled longer direct messages, which were expanded in April along with comments on retweets like this example:
According to the Wall Street Journal one of the main issues that Twitter is considering is how the longer tweets will appear. The debate is whether to extend the characters by 10 or so, or create a monetized publishing option.
Over the last year there have been quite a few updates and mobile upgrades to the top social network, which has been an attempt to attract more users. The latest announcement is following this same line of thinking, and will hopefully draw in more active accounts.
As this update develops, businesses could benefit from the change to a more “conversational” Twitter. This could potentially help weed out spam accounts, and create a more personalized connection with leads and customers – which is always good!
Susan Gilbert
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