What Will YOU Do With A Full 140 Characters?

Twitter supposedly has some exciting (yet unofficial) news to announce about their 140-character limit for tweets . (Well, it’s exciting if you are a digital nerd like me and many of my colleagues at LeadG2.) While the news is not public and Twitter has not made any official announcements about it yet, Bloomberg reported that a source leaked the details of an upcoming plan to change the way characters are counted on tweets. 

Currently, when you include a link or image in a tweet, that counts toward your total 140-character limit. This can greatly shorten the amount of content you can include in a post. If you’ve ever published a post to Twitter with links or images, then you know it can be very frustrating.

With the potential change, users would no longer have to make decisions on whether to include an image, or have to cut out important words, because we’d have the ability to utilize all 140 characters with actual words.

Twitter played around with the idea of greatly expanding the limit of their character count earlier this year, with quite some pushback, and for good reason. The 140-chracter count is what really makes Twitter unique, and increasing that count could drastically change the medium and it’s usage. However, this potential announcement seems like a nice way for Twitter to give a little more space for users to get their point across.

So, what will you do with the extra characters? 

While this change isn’t a drastic one, it could give marketers enough room to include another strategic hashtag, or opt for a custom-made meme—or even give the opportunity to spell a couple words correctly that you couldn’t fit before. 

Twitter has effectively reminded many of us of the KISS methodology… to Keep It Simple, Stupid! While that might seem a little aggressive for a social media strategy, it really is a great marketing (and life) lesson. Sometimes, less is more. Twitter ensures you make the most out of your characters, forcing you to rethink and strategize the words you choose. This slight change in their publishing will just mean we need to be even more careful with the words, images, and links we choose in order to make an impact and actually start conversations and drive traffic. 

If you’re a marketer, or even a salesperson, and you still haven’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon (and let’s be honest, it’s much past being a bandwagon—Twitter is here to stay, for now at least) then it might be time to reconsider.

And if you are on Twitter and tweeting away, use this as an opportunity to revisit your social media strategy. Is what you’re doing really effective? Are you tweeting into a black hole or are you making every character count? Do you have some intern in charge of your entire social media brand instead of making it a bigger focus of your brand strategy? Do you even share the right stuff on social media in the first place? 

Whether you’re a Twitter newbie or a tweeting professional, these articles can help:

First, start with a social strategy for your blog. It’s a must!

Plus, you’ll want to brush up on the many reasons why social media and content marketing go hand in hand.

If you don’t already know the latest data on social media marketing, this post can help.

And if you find yourself stuck focusing on just one social media site, it’s time you consider the different reasons why a multi-platform social media approach makes the most sense.

My final tip includes the one thing you should NEVER do on social media. And I mean never. Though it’s probably fair to say this could be a much longer list than one. 

Happy tweeting!