Today Twitter finally announced that you can get more text in your 140 twitter characters. As we know from good old SMS, people get excited with limitations in number of characters you can use. It leads to a “new” language. Leading to shortening words and using abbreviations to put your message across. Twitter cleverly took advtantage of this phenomenon and soon a whole new “Twitter” language emerged. This limitation was good for individuals but with the addition of new features like adding links, photos or GIFs to your tweet, the actual text of your message got shorter and shorter. So while the character limitation was great during the early adoption years of Twitter, it became a barrier for growth later on. For the simple reason that businesses need more characters to put their messages across.
In May earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would deal with this issue. And from today onwards, we finally see these changes implemented. Here is what has been announced:
Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward.
Media attachments: When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet.
Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: You can now retweet on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
Hopefully these changes may give Twitter that boost in subscriber growth that it so desperately needs.
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