What Twitter’s New Longer Tweets Mean For Social Content Managers

September 26, 2016

Are you a social media manager or responsible for producing Twitter content? Thanks to a welcome update to the native platform, your working life may have just become easier overnight. A tweak to tweet composition is about to make content planning a considerably less bumpy ride, and may even open a few doors for you.

You may or may not have heard by now, but the good folks over at Twitter HQ have eased up on the chunk of characters currently occupied by a user upon upload of either images or video. In this post, we’ll be providing you with some of the most obvious advantages to this change.

It will negate the horrific process of character cramming.

We’ve all been there. A high priority message may dictate the need for so much more textual content than a single tweet will allow.

The pressure of combining this with suitable creative content can be an absolute nightmare at the best of times.

140 characters are now all yours to populate with text and links. URLs do still count towards the limit, unfortunately. But this is nothing that cannot be solved with a good link shortening service like bit.ly!

Say more about what’s happening! Rolling out now: photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters. pic.twitter.com/I9pUC0NdZC

— Twitter (@twitter) September 19, 2016

It frees up more room for fuller, flowing phrases. So express yourself/your brand!

Engagement is not always a neat and tidy thing and you’ll have to fiddle with the details a lot before you end up with the right package for your audience. This includes the format of your content.

Sometimes, it can be hard not to sound like a robot via social media. This is a definite no-go if you’re tweeting on behalf of a brand or organisation. Having limited space in which to flexibly express and notify your most engaged users doesn’t really help in the scenario either.

Now you haven’t been given enough extra characters to write a Shakespeare-like sonnet, but you just might find it easier to include those phrases and connective words that humanise your message that little bit more!

It opens the door for increased use of hashtags!

You may have read recently our post about how to up your hashtag game, where we covered just how valuable they can be to increasing your reach and engagement at the post level.

In the past, the inclusion of media in your tweets may have really eaten away at your count and made it totally impossible to supplement this with URLs and a hashtag to round things off.

So it could be time to start renewing your focus on what hashtags are going to effectively steer your message towards an optimal audience.

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