Twitter is Giving you more Characters….

Well they are but there is still the 140 character limit. You maybe asking how can you get more characters? They are not counting some of the things you put in your Tweet. Which is a great move for Twitter. What did they announce? This is the official announcement from Twitter:

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.

Lets start with replies. It’s great for group Tweets. Sometimes when you had too many people in them, there was no way to really have a conversation. All the space was taken up by the names of the people. Plus it’s considered rude to delete someone so you can reply. I think this will allow some actual conversations to happen on the service. Also, @ names are part of this too.

Next is the media attachments! Right now you can add up to 4 pictures. Before they would take up space of your Tweet. no more. You can be more descriptive in your post rather than worry about the media taking up spaces. This also applies to gifs, pols, videos and quote tweets. So great move.

One of the more puzzling is the Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself. I”m not sure there will be a lot of times for me to do this. As for brands, I think it would be more appropriate to create a new tweet rather than a rt of yourself. Maybe after a while I will see the value of this new feature.

The last is if you wanted a reply to go public you had to put a period before the @ sign. This was before you tag them. Now it will show in the feed. There seems to be some controversy over this one. Twitter has said that not all will be in the stream. I’m still researching this to see what would happen and when. I have no problem with my responses being public and everyone to see them. If I had something private I would just send a DM.

These changes will increase the space you can compose Tweets. I have found myself at the mercy of some of these before. I had something great to say and would get cut off or have to send two Tweets. This would make it more complicated to follow. These haven’t launched yet but will be over the summer. They are giving developers a heads up to make sure your favorite Twitter app is updated to reflect these changes.

Tim is the founder of Element33. A social media agency specializing in education, management and strategy for small businesses. He comes from a traditional marketing agency but has embraced all things digital. He considers himself a marketing nerd and believes that all marketing is tied together. This means no matter what silo you are in, social, email, seach, etc, changes in one will affect the other!

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