A long-standing topic for some time now. A large of amount of ‘will they won’t they’. Twitter finally have taken the leap to double their notorious 140 character limit. But what does this mean for the platform?
Twitter first and foremost have decided to increase the limit for its 330 million monthly users to alleviate the “cramming” issue they have for all users of different languages. Obviously, this is a problem that has existed ever since the platforms beginnings. With this being said, they have announced that this feature will not be enabled for Japanese, Korean and Chinese users as they have stated that cramming is not an issue for these languages due to the “density of their writing systems” allowing users to say a lot more with fewer characters. But who is this for exactly?
The General Populace
Twitter has always been the platform for people to speak whats on there mind in just a few sentences and will most likely remain this way as statistics show that during the testing sessions in September, it was found that only 1 percent of users actually reached the new limit. But this was part of Twitters overall plan, as they stated that they did fear that users would fill up the full 280 character limit from then on forward. But, they played their cards right and it has turned out the way they had hoped – a way for users to express what’s on their mind without the efforts of editing their tweets.
Businesses
The extended limit has opened up a whole new world for businesses to extend their social media marketing. Businesses no longer have the struggle of condensing their content to be posted on Twitter. They can now obtain the same sort of impact with more density in each post as they can obtain on their other platforms. Businesses now have the ability to go into more depth when it comes to products or services that they provide. Small businesses especially gain a world of benefits as in this day and age, nearly all businesses have a Twitter account, so standing out in the crowd has never been more important. While before, pinpointing exact information to advertise with just 140 characters was something that required more time and effort in an attempt to engage audiences, they now have the power to go into more depth and allow their social media to convey much more than just bite-sized snippets of their business.
Campaigns
Other benefits this brings to the table included less initial planning for campaigns over busy periods, such as Black Friday for instance. Businesses would often have to prepare completely different campaigns for different platforms, especially Twitter, due to the short character limit. Now, this is much less of an issue. Campaigns can be more streamlined this way and subsequently, this not only benefits the time spent but the overall quality of each campaign.
Overall, the impact the new Twitter limit has made on Social Media has been much better than expected. While at first glance the update seemed to be targeted at the general populous in an attempt to make their lives easier on Twitter, this update subsequently has become a crucial benefit to businesses as going forward it is already showing to be a major asset in improving their marketing as a whole. It has opened up a whole new world for smaller businesses especially to further improve their social media presence and from here on out, 2018 is going to be a huge step in the right direction for them.
