Twitter’s made more wiggle room for its users’ messages. But that’s really all it is – nothing more than room to wiggle.
As of Monday, quoted tweets and multimedia, such as links, videos, memes, GIFs, no longer count against Twitter’s storied 140-character limit, making it easier for users to share more content in messages. The company announced the alteration in May, which is a slice of a bigger vision that allows users more flexibility and utility in the future, according to its Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey.
Earlier this year, Twitter considered raising its character limit to as high as 10,000, but this amount of freedom would contradict the company’s signature allowance for brief, concise messages suited for breaking news headlines and quips, which helps differentiate it from competing companies.
Twitter originally adopted its renowned 140-character limit so that users could fit their Tweets within a single mobile text message, which was a popular way to send messages in 2006, when the service launched, before smartphones were born and saturated the marketplace.
If too restricted before, we may see more users adding media or extra media to their messages now that the character requirement for photos and links has been abolished, and if they were smart marketers they would definitely leverage the extra real estate in every way possible.
Some ways marketers are taking advantage of Twitter’s new feature include adding more hashtags to their Tweets for SEO purposes, sharing both a link and multimedia in the same message to make Tweets stand out more in a Twitter feed, and creating clearer, more complete thoughts when composing messages instead of ultra-abbreviated ones due to constantly being on a character crunch.
But an expanded character limit isn’t the only horizon Twitter’s explored recently; last week it broadcast its first NFL live stream football games, which caught the attention of about 2.1 million users and increased the company’s share price by more than four percent by close on Friday, as a result. Twitter recently paid $10 million to the National Football League for global rights to stream 10 of this season’s Thursday night games free for its users.
In addition, last month it announced the launch of a creator revenue program, which will allow users to generate revenue at scale by posting original videos onto their accounts from their desktop or mobile devices.
Twitter’s aim is to gain more users and more revenue, of course, and considering many of us are expressive, sports-loving, money-hungry people, bringing more speaking room, football and cash opportunities to the table seem like great places sow the seeds.