Since 1999
Did the Twitter 140-character limit hamper your creativity? Did you feel frustrated that you could not write more in a tweet because the url share or picture ate up those few characters?
Over the years, Twitter has emerged as one of the most popular social networking sites, the other being Facebook. From a micro-bogging site with a simple 140-character text message, it has evolved as a powerful medium for brands to reach existing and new customers. However users have often complained about the lack of space for expression. The 140-character limit is way too small.
Now you no longer have to worry about Twitter character limit constraints. Twitter has officially announced on its blog on May 24th that in the upcoming weeks or months, @names in replies, URLs and media attachments such as images, videos, GIFs, and polls will not be included in the character count anymore. In other words, your tweets can be longer. You will have more freedom to write longer messages.
Currently, adding images and inserting URLs (even a short url) in tweets gobbles up a precious 24 and 23 characters respectively. That’s a waste especially for the twitterati who would love to have some more text or media in a single tweet.
The new Twitter Update is expected to offer more flexibility to the users. Let’s have a look what will likely change:
Names in replies: When you reply to a tweet, @names will not count as characters. This implies you won’t have to chew every character when replying to a tweet. Go ahead and be more expressive.
Media attachments: One this update comes into force, you can add photos, videos, polls, Quote Tweets, or GIFs without worrying about them consuming your character limit. Write more, express more!
Retweet yourself: How often has it happened that a really cool tweet went unnoticed. But you can’t retweet your own tweet. Twitter is likely enable the Retweet button on own tweets. So you thought no one saw your tweet? No worries… simply retweet!
No need to use “.@”: Generally, tweets that begin with a username don’t reach all your followers and are found in Tweets & replies section. But the new rule will change the game altogether. Tweets with a username will be accessible to all your followers. That also implies you no longer need to use .@ in front of the username to make it visible to wide audience. If you wish a response to a certain user to be noticed by your followers, you can retweet it easily.
Get ready to goodbye to forced abbreviations that we are so accustomed to in tweets in order to fit in extra text. Twitter has only announced it now. Be patient… these gamechanger updates are soon going to roll!
