Dive Brief:
- Just last week news came out that Twitter was going to change what counts against the 140-character tweet limit, and now the social media company has made it official.
- Twitter CMO Leslie Berland told CNBC the changes are meant to help with engagement and are tied to user feedback, saying, "We're looking at the company goals overall; refining, to make the platform more intuitive, making it even faster."
- Some of the changes include: @names in replies will not count toward the character limit, media attachments (such as images, videos, GIFs and polls) will not count, and another change is users will no longer have to use the “.@” convention to get tweets beginning with a user name to reach their entire audience. Another change is the retweet button will be enabled on users’ own tweets, making it easier for them to add commentary on their own tweets as the conversation or news evolves.
Dive Insight:
Twitter has been under pressure to make changes to the platform from its restless shareholders. Internally the company has shown much more willingness to try out fundamental changes to its core product – such as altering its iconic character limitation – under CEO Jack Dorsey after his return.
All the announced changes should make using the platform more efficient and a bit more user-friendly, something that should please Twitter users and Twitter marketers alike.
For marketers, the main impact of these changes is there will be a bit more room for words within tweets, especially rich media tweets and replies (something that will improve using the platform for customer service.) Adding a few characters might not seem like it will have a great impact, but since Twitter users and marketers have become very adept at working around the current character limitation, every few extra characters are likely to go a long way.
Still, Seeking Alpha reports the move might be a case of too little, too late, and pointed out that Twitter shares have fallen to post-IPO lows. In fact, MoffettNathanson downgraded the company to “sell” citing advertiser fatigue as well as questioning the value of new initiatives.
According to Twitter’s blog post, the changes will be available in the coming months.
In the coming months, we're introducing new ways for you to express even more with a Tweet: https://t.co/l1sWRvXWqr pic.twitter.com/zzhWpRcABs
— Twitter (@twitter) May 24, 2016
