Twitter Announces Supersized Tweets Without Losing Its 140-Character Limit

Twitter News

Exciting news in the world of Twitter. The social giant announced today we’ll soon be able to supersize our tweets without losing its 140 character limit. What does this mean for marketers? We can become more expressive and creative with images, videos, GIFs and even polls without having to sacrifice valuable text space. It will also become easier to communicate with others when we reply. @names will no longer count towards the 140-character limit. That’s a nice win! And as a marketer, I’m equally excited about the ability to Retweet ourselves. This will be fun and interesting.

Here’s the breakdown of changes according to Twitter’s blog:

  • 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, no more penny-pinching 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. More room for words!
  • Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’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 ”.@” convention, 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.

As stated in the New York Times:

“Twitter’s unique syntax and 140-character limit have held the service back,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the industry research firm eMarketer. “Twitter has been saying for years now that it wants to make the service more user-friendly, and I think users will really appreciate having the ability to say what they want to say in the way they want to say it.”

These new changes are expected to take place in the next few months to allow developers time to update hundreds of thousands of products utilizing the Twitter API. This will make for a much smoother transition.

What do you think of these new changes? Take my poll and tell me about it!

Twitter Announces Supersized Tweets Without Losing Its 140-Chacter Limit