In some circles, people are getting downright giddy about Twitter’s announcement that they are changing how they count characters, but they are not actually increasing the number of characters allowed. The change is that certain items such as quotes, videos, polls and GIFs won’t count toward the 140-character total. It isn’t as radical as actually increasing the character count, but it does give businesses a little more room to use Twitter to their best advantage to connect with potential customers.
Twitter is great for sharing news articles and your blog posts and engaging with others, but that character limit is a challenge. True, it is what defines Twitter and sets it apart from other social media outlets, but it is still a challenge. Twitter was considering upping the character count to 10,000 but decided that would fundamentally change the micro-blogging mission of keeping messages short and sweet.
Your tweets won’t be much longer with this change, but it means you don’t have to use up your character count on media attachments. So what can you do better now with the new approach to character counting?
Twitter claims that people are three times more likely to engage with a Tweet that includes a visual – and now those visuals don’t make a dent in your character count. You can include four per Tweet. One of the key goals of social media marketing is to learn more about your target market – and polling them via Twitter just got a bit easier. (So why not do it? It’s also a fun way to engage people.)
Another change in the works is that @names won’t count either, so that means more conversation with more people. That holds the potential for deeper engagement with your followers. More changes are expected soon, and these are likely to try to cater to business users as Twitter is realizing the power of their platform for digital marketing.
Twitter has just begun rolling out this change so it won’t be available to all users instantly. That gives you some time to tweak your Twitter strategy while you are waiting.
Want to know more about using Twitter for your business? Our expert team are more than happy to help!!
By Irene Hislop
By Conor McCaffrey