Twitter has increased its character count from 140 per tweet, to 280 characters per tweet – Does this Twitter Increase matter to you?
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Twitter has been, and continues to be, a social platform that you either love or hate. Some people swear by it, others think it’s a waste of time. Like everything, it all depends on how you use it and who your target audience is.
From a business perspective, I don’t think the increased character count will make a huge impact on anything. However, from a storytelling perspective, it might increase the attention of your audience and prove to be an even more effective sales funnel.
Improved grammar and proper english might see a resurgence and I’m hoping people ease up on the hashtags a wee bit. On the flip side, it may create a lesser impact for strong headlines… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
The big change happened last week (November 7, 2017) and now everyone is testing out the waters to see what works, what they can get away with, and if it really matters in the big picture.
Here’s some statistics that might make you go WOW!
- According to Buffer Social, the fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64 year age bracket.
- Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends, yet only 19% of brands tweet on the weekend.
- Tweets with images get 2x the engagement to those without.
- Tweets with less than 100 characters get 17% more engagement.
- Tweets with hashtags get 2x more engagement (but I only recommend you use 1 or 2 per tweet).
- 66% of users are on mobile (so make sure you make your tweets mobile friendly)
Twitter has been declining in popularity for some time now, and as a result is making efforts to be more flexible with this Twitter Increase in characters. In 2017, they changed it so that your image does not count as part of the character count. Same with videos, quotes and @replies.
The site currently has 330 million active users. This compares with 800 million for Instagram and more than 2 billion users for Facebook.
Many thought that with this Twitter increase, people would fill up their timelines with 280 character tweets to use up the entire space. According to Twitter, this did not happen. Only 5% of tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters.
Social media changes more rapidly than any other medium in history and that’s the only constant. As digital marketing is adopted by more people and businesses, all the giant social platforms will do their best to make you want to use them above anyone else. And who knows what the digital marketing landscape will look like in 5 years… I suspect there’s things coming that we can’t even imagine right now!.