Twitter has rolled out new 280 characters limit for all users a few days ago. It was supposed to bring a new standard to users and give them more freedom to express themselves. How it worked out in real life?"Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain." - that's how Twitter product manager starts their article about new feature development. Limitations were the main reason for the changes made to the application.Due to Twitter research, 9% of all tweets written in English were exactly 140 character long.Almost 1 in every 10 tweets was written and probably needed to be shortened in the process, with the thought that your message could be more specific or better explained.Looking at this statistic may lead us to a conclusion that the change was necessary.On the other hand, many will say that the 140 limit was something with a huge emotional attachment from the users. This exact number of characters defined Twitter for a long time.Everybody on the platform agreed to the idea of brief and short messages which can be sent or received.It was kind of a challenge for everyone to shine in the jungle of 2-3 sentence messages...https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status/912787813069934592
With our social media manager, Postfity supporting 280 characters limit on twitter you don't have to cram anymore!
Twitter, however, found another issue with the limit...
The platform is used in many languages all over the world.Product team analyzed different tweets and it appeared that you need a quite noticeably different amount of characters to share the same exact message in various languages.Languages with symbols such as Chinese or Japanese were much less "character intensive" than the ones which used the alphabet system.Small percent of Japanese tweets have 140 characters (only 0.4%). But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%).Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34.Twitter research shows also that the character limit is a major cause of bad experiences in English speaking users, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese.Twitter is more popular in markets with symbol-based (less character intensive) language speaking countries.It leads to a simple conclusion - bigger character limit will attract more users from markets, which were concerned previously about the limitations.
What does the change mean for the small Businesses or Influencers on Twitter?
Actually, this feature will give you few not so obvious advantages in communication:
1.Customer service
Yes... Finally, it will be possible to address you User issue without the need to send them to use your "Support Form" or email. Tweeter is the main source of all customer service requests for a companies.Public tweets shouldn't be a place to solve every issue with your product, but sometimes if the problem can be solved quickly and may also affect other users - it's wise to address it that way, so everyone can see it. It makes you look like a more caring company that way, and can lead to a bigger trust to your brand/person.
2.No more 1/2
Tweets with 1/2, or 1/3 is a thing of a past now! Remember how annoying it was to find only one part of a message and look for previous one by clicking on it and redirecting...
3.Disclaimers
Some of the tweets contain paid sponsor message, some contain alcohol/tobacco advertisement which needs to have special text displayed with them to be legal. The same with the financial sector.https://twitter.com/kennethn/status/913053785517260801This legal sentence sometimes took 1/2 or 1/3 of the entire message which looked ridiculously and made twitter not an attractive place for some advertisers.
4.CREATIVE AND FUNNY TWEETS WITH #280characters !
The reason why many of us excited about the changes, or probably reason why some of you clicked on the article and read it up to this point is to see all of the creativeness from various brands on Twitter!Not to keep you waiting... enjoy!https://twitter.com/BrianRossAd/status/928049095343669248We could end it with this one really...https://twitter.com/IAmOxfordComma/status/928583885444845569https://twitter.com/LonelyGoomba/status/928084680120897537https://twitter.com/IsiahWhitlockJr/status/928312886459535366https://twitter.com/NASAGoddard/status/928356699043491842https://twitter.com/googlemaps/status/928383485982765057https://twitter.com/McDo_PH/status/928110324091297792https://twitter.com/borussia_en/status/928204251674894336https://twitter.com/acmilan/status/928218378396930048https://twitter.com/OfficialNBARefs/status/928038875653722112https://twitter.com/Ldn_Ambulance/status/928257853336453121https://twitter.com/FCBarcelona/status/928259289394876416https://twitter.com/pottermore/status/928294321325002752https://twitter.com/DisneyPixar/status/928070850342895616https://twitter.com/wwf_uk/status/928187376140279808https://twitter.com/BBCEarth/status/928208672504852480https://twitter.com/RoySocChem/status/928200456760852480https://twitter.com/budlight/status/928338115525267456https://twitter.com/brian_bilston/status/928293538713997317https://twitter.com/LastPass/status/928359839335616513https://twitter.com/SarahMGellar/status/928028466607296513https://twitter.com/NetflixANZ/status/928082702196076545And trust us... You can easily find many more
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