The 19th of September 2016 was a big day for Twitter and Twitter users. They finally activated the Twitter update they’d promised us earlier in the year. From that date they released the 23 characters they had been stealing from us every-time we attached an image, a video, a GIF, a poll or quoted a Tweet.
Earlier this year there were rumours of Twitter extending their character limit to 10,000. You may remember I wasn’t a fan. This latest update is one I can live with, I’m still limited, I still have to be creative but I no longer have to sacrifice words just because I want to share an image.
Find out what I think about the latest Twitter update below
What will you do with your extra characters?
23 is a very small number but it will allow us to finish sentences better. It will let us add full words and edit less. We could add more hashtags and emojis and be more expressive. What it might do is encourage us to use more images, videos and rich media in our Tweets and that could be good for both Twitter and us.
Why are Twitter making this update?
I have a theory. If you’ve used Twitter ads you’ll know that they strongly recommend using media with every tweet you promote. Tweets with media always do better in ads, the engagement rate is high in comparison with naked, text tweets.
We know Twitter has a problem with engagement. They introduced the heart button to tackle it and reported success, but was it enough? It’s easy to click the heart button but we’ll spend longer looking at an image or video right?
I don’t have the stats but my hunch that by giving us these extra 23 characters they are hoping we’ll attach more rich content to our Tweets, we’ll stop sending people offline to our links and start mixing it up.
If that’s what they want I’m willing to give it a shot are you?
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