Social Media Marketing Agency Shares Potential Impact of Twitter’s Character Count Increase

Social Media Marketing Agency Shares Potential Impact of Twitter’s Character Count Increase

Social Media Marketing Agency Shares Potential Impact of Twitter’s Character Count Increase 2560 1707 Kraus Marketing

Social Media Marketing Agency Shares Potential Impact of Twitter’s Character Count Increase

You all know the social media platform Twitter and its infamous 140-character count tweets that sometimes make finding the perfect wording quite the challenge. Well, times are changing because Twitter has decided to increase, rather double, the character count to 280 after a testing period that showed longer tweets receiving higher engagement rates. As a social media marketing agency, we took a look at how this change could impact not only Twitter’s active usage, but your social media campaign as well.

The Basics

Twitter was noticing that tweets in a number of languages were consistently reaching the max character limit. That included 9% of tweets in the English language. The social media platform considered this a “cramming issue” and believed it was slowing down the process, as users had to edit and reword their thoughts until it fit the constricting 140-character limit. This may have also caused some users to delete the tweet all together before publishing. This was not an issue in languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, however, so their character limit will remain the same.

Twitter decided to hold a testing period, where they offered a selected number of users 280 characters. It was found that 5% of the tweets were longer than 140 characters and only 1% of tweets actually reached the 280-character limit during this trial period.

Twitter’s Future

Okay great, so what does that mean? There were a couple of findings taken away during this test period. One thing is that in general, people would use the character count increase when necessary, but for the most part, tweets held their typically brief appeal. That means Twitter still has the potential to remain a social media platform where users can escape novel length thoughts on their timeline, while it also conforms to those who can’t quite fit everything into a 140-character limit. Of course, there will be character happy users who take advantage of the increase just because they can, but Twitter expects that phase to fade out soon enough.

A second point of note was that it doesn’t seem to cause an influx of tweets by users, although there was no decrease. Twitter has recently been on the decline and is certainly looking for some sort of update that can begin bringing it back to life. But you need to remember that this update has just taken effect for all users and only time can tell the true results. It may be a little while until the platform sees positive results in this department and an increased user base once again.

Your Future

There was, however, a huge positive that did come from this character limit increase. Data has shown that users will receive more engagement on their longer tweets. This includes more likes, retweets, and mentions, as well as more followers. This also seems to be increasing the amount of time spent on Twitter as a whole.

So, if your business has been struggling to fit everything in the typical 140-character count or is lacking in engagements, now is your time to shine. Break the character limit barriers and push for high consumer engagement.

When asked for her thoughts on the new character count increase, our own Senior Social Media Manager, Angelina Paul replied, “Twitter has always been great for breaking news and information in real time. Lately though, I hear a lot of people saying that they only use Twitter to find out if other people are experiencing issues with Facebook, YouTube, or another more popular platform. If the increased engagement moves even some of the focus from useless celebrity tweets back to more informative short-form users, I think that would help bring people back. Of course, it could also just be the last desperate measures of a dying platform. Time will tell.”

Whether this update benefits the social media platform in the long run or not, it seems to be worth the effort for now. Twitter is continuing to listen to community feedback to help improve the site and continue to boost their growth efforts.

Are you curious about the changing world of social media and digital marketing? Kraus Marketing specializes in Social Media and Digital Marketing, and would love to help take your business to the next level. We service companies in the New Jersey and New York City area. Find out how we can help you by contacting us today.

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