Twitter is beginning a roll out over the next week where site users will be able to add multimedia to tweets – including pictures and videos – without eating into the 140-characters-a-post limit.
When Twitter was rumoured to be upping the character limit to 10,000 characters, it was largely met with resistance from many of its members. There was concern that such a huge change to the character count would change the nature of the platform.
However this change has found far wider acceptance from within the Twitter community and should help the company break out the rut it’s found itself in with user numbers static for 5 quarters in a row now, while new competitors including Instagram and Snapchat grow rapidly.
The main changes announced by Twitter will be –
- Replies:When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, less rationing of your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
- Media attachments:When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet.
- Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself:They’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
- Goodbye, .@:These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the “.@” convevention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
An additional benefit not mentioned by Twitter is that some companies will be able to once again use their full URL for branding purposes, rather than resorting to using a URL shortener in order to maximize the number of characters in each tweet.