“Deliver a message or an offer with a call to action; you can also insert a link and a hashtag so your target audience will see this #Twitter”
The above statement is exactly 140-characters long, which meets Twitter’s legendary length restriction for a tweet. I love Twitter because it’s a simple, intuitive tool and timely news source, especially for media professionals. Adhering to the 140-character limit is what made Twitter unique from other social platforms. Users had to be concise and to the point with their messages – but (as most things change) Twitter is said to be changing that rule.
According to an article in Re/code, Twitter is rumored to be building a new feature that will allow users the option to tweet a message with up to 10,000-characters. As someone who works to increase brand awareness, I see this as a great opportunity for messaging – and in PR, it’s crucial to craft the right message and deliver it to the right audience.
With 10,000 (or more) ways to potentially tweet a message, brands will have new opportunities to add value to their audience. Here are three reasons why Twitter’s character limit expansion will be beneficial for brands:
1.) More opportunity for thought leadership, audience building, and brand awareness. It can be extremely difficult to deliver a thorough message in 140 characters – I’m sure every tweeter has struggled with this at some point. The opportunity to provide a deeper, more in-depth perspective will establish users’ thought leadership on a topic or industry. In essence, tweets will soon be a type of long-form content where users will craft a snazzy headline in 140 characters, and viewers decide to expand and read the content. Users won’t be forced to leave Twitter to read your entire message, which can significantly increase the number of people who actually see it.
2.) An improved content marketing platform. Brands will have the opportunity to engage with their audience in new ways. With a more detailed message, brands will have more opportunity to educate, inform, and add value within the content/tweet itself. Furthermore, the tweet will still appear in 140 characters on the timeline – so tweets will still look the same as users scroll through tweets via their timeline. The silver lining is that users will not be forced to click a link and leave Twitter to get more information, which is less disruptive for your audience. Instead, the viewer will choose to either expand the tweet or click the link to learn more, which can still generate organic website traffic.
3.) More analytical data. Brands will be able to get even deeper insights into what messages are sticking. Currently, Twitter analytics show the impressions and engagements with a tweet, including detail expands, likes, retweets, profile clicks, follows, replies, and email shares. The possibilities with a character-limit expansion are sweeping, such as the number of expanded tweets, how long the tweet was expanded for, how far viewers scrolled down the expanded tweet, whether users clicked the link provided in the expanded tweet, or in the 140-character timeline view. Data is incredibly valuable to measure success.
It’s as though the 140-character “rule” became Twitter’s core essence. Since people fear change and a tweet is considered a small chirp, not a long birdsong, it is understandable why people are hesitant about the reported character limit expansion. It’ll be interesting to see if and when this goes into effect, how users react and how brands take advantage of this new opportunity.