Twitter has announced that they will stop counting photographs and links within its 140 character limit.
The change could come into effect in as little as two weeks!
What Does this Mean?
This change to the character limits on Twitter comes with cheers all around from the many that have found its character limits far too limiting.
Considering that an average link takes up 23 characters and an average image 24 characters simply having a link and an image in your tweet removed 47 of your characters, leaving you with just two-thirds of the space you had originally!
This change will mainly benefit those languages that traditionally have longer words.
People speaking languages such as German have often struggled to use Twitter due to the character limit. The inclusion of links and photos as part of the character limit restricted their involvement in the social media channel even further.
This change in the platform should hopefully assist many German speaking individuals as well as German businesses in getting more active on Twitter.
Why Has Twitter Changed Its Structure
It is thought that Twitter’s soon to be changed character limit is due to its declining customer base.
Over the last few years, the platform has struggled to attract new users, losing them to other social media platforms that aren’t as restrictive. This has had a huge impact on their business and resulted in them reporting a net loss of £62 million in 2015.
This change follows a change they made back in June 2015 where they increased the limit on its direct messages to 10,000 characters.
Is Twitter the first of its kind? Short answer – no.
China’s answer to Twitter, Sina Weibo, removed its character limit all together just a few short months ago. Twitter is simply following suit.
You can read more about this story with the BBC – www.bbc.co.uk and Wired.co.uk – www.wired.co.uk
Here at ExtraDigital we are eager to see how this change in the character limits impacts the use of Twitter, the use of Twitter as a marketing platform, the impact it has on multilingual marketing and also whether longer posts mean better or worse click through rates and engagement.
Watch this space.
