More Characters for Twitter - Boon to Marketers?

Twitter has recently started to update their character count policies which will allow for a Faster, More Accessible User Experience.

In the coming months Twitter will make several changes to "simplify" Tweets by having less characters count towards the arbitrary 140 limit. These changes will remove items such as @names and media attachments so that they will no longer use up valuable "character count" real estate. Here are the new changes headed your way:

– Replies: Ever get tagged into a long conversation chain only to find that the @names take up most of your room to reply? @names will no longer count towards the 140-character count.

– Media attachments: You know what they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Attachments like photos, GIFs, videos or polls will no longer eat up precious characters! This means you get double the space. Right now, media attachments populate a link that counts as extra characters (links written within the copy will still count towards the total 140-limit). Attach visuals without worrying about limitations and get more characters back to write with. 

– Bump your tweets to the top: Twitter is enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so that you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself to give an old tweet some extra love.

–  Goodbye, ".@": Gone are the days you have to add a period to the front of an @name so that it shows up on your feed. New tweets that begin with @ will automatically reach all of your followers.

Standby for more Carousel Adds:

The carousel allows the user to group together a series of images and or videos in one tweet gives everyone a more dynamic way to storytell, display product, coax, and hopefully persuade users to act. With the new count rules in play, users will have more real estate to engage customers and grow their social media marketing efforts.

Even though many question the future of Twitter, those of us who love it hope that Jack Dorsey and crew hold the line on brevity and save us from the rants, fratricidal banter, and long-winded manic pixie dream girl humble-bragging that dominates so much of the rest of social media. In a noisy digital world, #brevity is *still* the "soul of wit" and the key to keeping Twitter the best place for live commentary, connections, and conversations.