Twitter is considering the option of extending how many characters you can tweet at one time. Currently 10,000 characters is the suggestion, which would be the same as the current amount of characters allowed in the private messaging option.
Don’t worry though, this doesn’t mean that you will have long articles overwhelming your timeline. It will mean that even though you are allowed to write more in each tweet, the timeline will still only show the first 140 characters followed by a ‘read more’ button.
The obvious feature of Twitter is that tweets are meant to be short and snappy, which was the original selling point and one of the main reasons why twitter first exploded on the social media scene. It was different to Facebook and Myspace. The term #beyond140 has been used on twitter to express opinions on the new idea, with the vast majority of users not happy.
Brad Murphy writes:
Dr. M. David Rudd is also opposed to the new Twitter limit.
Advantages of the 140 Twitter word limit was that it inspired people to get across their thoughts in a creative and to the point way; it is a quick and an accessible social media option which uses ‘live conversation’. It was this constraint that gave Twitter the edge over other social media sites, so why change that?
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that one of the main reasons behind the change was that Twitter had spent a long time looking at what people are doing on the social media platform and they noticed many people were taking screen shots of longer messages to post on twitter, he continues with the idea that what if Twitter gave people the ability to type their screen shots as real text – text that could be searched for and highlighted it would give more power to Twitter. He believes that as long as the change is consistent with what people want, they will explore the options.
However even though the vast majority of users seems against the change, the new word limit could in fact help your business for the better. Businesses could use the extended tweets to provide better customer support, brands can respond to complaints and queries from one platform rather than switching to phone or email making it very convenient for the customer. Keeping customer service on twitter can then lead to gaining more followers which means more people will see your business content more regularly.
#Beyond140 could well be a good thing – the average user is not forced to write more if they don’t want to and businesses can reap the benefits of being able to interact more with customers, but at the same time without clogging up peoples’ timelines, seems a win win. What are your thoughts on #Beyond140?
