Twitter has been precious about it’s unique 140 character limit for tweets since it launched in 2006. The quick-fire social media platform is famous for it’s short messages often forcing users to use text speak or condense their message to the vital point that they want to make. Because of this, some messages can come across quite blunt or make no sense at all!
It can take a bit of time to get your head around and find the right balance and tone to represent your business on Twitter. It’s important to deliver the message you want whilst keeping up the standards and values of the company. Did you know that “there are 500 million tweets sent each day? That’s 6,000 tweets every second!”
With over 320 million users, Twitter is a serious player in the social media market. We genuinely love using Twitter for business (as Social Progress, SoPro Janet, SoPro Esther and SoPro Mel). It’s a great way to connect with people without being too intrusive. Conversations can be started easily and information be shared. There have been rumours of Twitter loosing out to other social media platforms like Facebook and Snapchat but we don’t think it’s going anywhere…
Tweets were originally limited to 140 characters with images and web links taking 24 characters each. That’s a massive chunk out of your character allowance! This often left fellow tweeters (*cough* social media account managers *cough*) less than amused when wanting to make a point, give a call to action and make the message visual!
Their last major update was when they allowed tweeters to “tag up to 10 users” in their images without it impacting on the character limit. This means that if you tweet something with an image that’s relevant to other users, you can tag them in the image and they’ll get a notification.
There have been whispers and promises of lifting the Twitter character limit for years including:
- Twitter handles (@_____) won’t count towards a tweet character count
- Images won’t be counted towards a tweet character count
- Some people want to see Twitter’s character count completely lifted!
We think that Twitter’s character count keeps it unique however we are absolutely over the moon to officially learn of Twitter’s latest update! It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for..!
According to a tweet from Twitter on 19th September 2016: “photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters.” (cue confetti cannon and music “celebrate good times, come on!“)
No longer will we have to cram our words into less than 2/3 of the allocated space to tweet. And no more excuses for boring and text-heavy Twitter accounts! We can all use images to make our tweets more engaging and interesting.
Esther’s pretty keen on ensuring clients get to grips with creating visual content and this Twitter update is music to our ears!
Hats off to you Twitter. We love you!
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