Twitter will roll out expanded tweets on September 19

Dive Brief:

Twitter is finally instating changes to the 140 character cap on its tweets next Monday, Sept. 19, The Verge reports, a development that the social media giant first hinted at in May.
The update adjusts what factors into a tweet's character limit, with media attachments like images, videos and polls, along with usernames at the beginning of replies, no longer counting toward the character count.
"This is the most notable change we’ve made in recent times around conversation in particular, and around giving people the full expressiveness of the 140 characters," CEO Jack Dorsey told The Verge in May. "I’m excited to see even more dialog because of this."

Dive Insight:

Despite earlier hints that Twitter might radically expand the length of tweets (some reports even suggesting the company was considering a new 10,000 character limit), the social platform now plans to preserve its iconic 140-character limit, one that CEO Jack Dorsey describes as a “beautiful constraint.” The new changes being made are instead subtler and adhere to the 140 character cap while still offering users more real estate for tweeting and discussion. For marketers, the change will offer more flexibility with tweeting as well as the ability to use more interactive elements without cutting into the character count.

The tweet formatting change comes during a rough year for Twitter during which the company has struggled with stagnating user growth on top of facing stiff competition from Snapchat, whose rapidly growing user base has begun to siphon off some of the mobile ad revenue that was previously going to Twitter. Twitter is striving to make reinvent itself while still retaining its core brand identity. Recent moves by Twitter include deals with major professional sports organizations to live stream games and original content. The centerpiece of these deals is the ability live stream 10 NFL Thursday Night Football games this season — a multimedia endeavor that demonstrates the platform's ambitions to expand its capabilities and content beyond the micro-blogosphere.