Twitter 280: The Good, the Bad, & the Opportunity

There was big news afoot in the world of Twitter. CEO Jack Dorsey announced a plan to double the character limit of tweets from 140 to 280.

DOUBLE?! Did I hear that right?

And that was the typical reaction from everyone from twitter users to non-twitter users.

Honestly? The first reaction most of us had is how the current world’s most powerful man, and prominent twitter user, Donald Trump, would react to this. ("Shh! Don't tell him", said some White House staffers)

Full disclosure: I am a major twitter user. I started in Nov 2010 and it has become my largest sphere of social media influence. I am currently at 425,000 followers and have tweeted over 125,000 times.

I love twitter. It has given me so much opportunity as a thought leadership brand. Sure, I spend a lot of time there, maybe too much. But I also am greatly critical of Twitter (Don’t get me started on bullies & trolls), like a close family member.

When the 280 announcement hit, I was both excited and scared, but certainly felt the need to talk about it. For me, it represents a much bigger shift and risk than most people realize. So, without further background, here are some thoughts to keep in mind.

The Challenge & Why Do This

NO GROWTH IN ACTIVE USERS: Twitter in the past few years has seen it's growth slow down and eventually become stagnant at 328 Million active users worldwide. In fact, this summer it saw active user engagement drop in the US from 70 million to 68 million the past quarter for the very first time. This stagnation or decline means less advertising dollars and less businesses will be likely to spend on targeted ads.

MONEY: The company had an IPO in 2013, starting at $44 a share. Now Twitter shares linger at $16, far below the IPO success of it’s former big brother Facebook. I say 'former' because Facebook is no longer in the same immediate family. Facebook is more like Great-Uncle Moneybags or Scrooge McDuck. The stagnation of active Twitter users is mostly to blame for the poor share growth.

Most importantly, Twitter the company has never turned a profit.

So, Twitter has had to evolve, adapt, innovate or die.

How Have They Evolved So Far

It’s not like Twitter has lacked any Innovation. In fact, this new 280-character test has been a long time in the making.

Over the years, Twitter has added a ton of new things both good and bad:

• Eliminated character counts for links and @handle replies
• Introducing native video uploads
• Setting no character limits for DM (Direct Messages)
• Adding Live streaming via Periscope
• Creating a Mute button to their Block functions to deal with spammers.

So, Twitter hasn’t been sitting on it hands. They just haven’t come up with a game-changer.

That is until now.

I know many of my friends, colleagues and fellow tweeters will disagree and say that this is not a game-changer. But hear me out! When it comes to addressing the reason why Twitter needs this, I believe the new 280 limit will do the job of getting new users and grow that all-important active user base. At the same time, they will maintain their culture and point of difference of brevity and speed. For Twitter, growth is all that matters right now. Set your emotional biases aside my friends.

Why This 280 is Good

MORE SPACE: The biggest complaint by tweeters is not enough space to tweet. I personally spend extra time daily trying to be concise with too many of my important tweets about politics, social justice and leadership. Yes, brevity is good, for most of my tweets it’s frustrating. Like Twitter says, now there will be less cramming. There will also be less need for tweet storming (but we will still have them).

INCREASED TWEET VALUE: The biggest gain will be in cogent, well thought out tweets that can now tell a short story, flush out details of an event or make a stronger argument. In my case, when I want to post about healthcare, I often had 4-5 points to make, but the character limit constrained me. I can now cite more reasons in my tweet. Additionally, some of the more inspirational or creative tweeters can share longer, thorough quotes and entire poems, etc.

CORE VALUE REMAINS: The core value and benefit of Twitter for thought leadership, event updates and information exchange stays the same.

1. Responsiveness: Twitter is the go to place for the most immediate things happening in the world. If someone scores a goal in the World Cup, or if there is an earthquake, or there is breaking news, Twitter is the first place we see it. It's speed still has a slight edge over Facebook. People also respond the most quickly on this platform and they still will.
2. Accessibility: No other social platform has this. I can’t send Lady Gaga, Lebron James or Barack Obama a personal message on LinkedIn or Facebook. But on Twitter I can feel like I am directly talking to them (even if they don’t read it). Users love feeling they can access the people they follow.
3. Brevity: 280 is FAR less characters allowed than the 1,300 on LinkedIn, 63,206 on Facebook, and 2,200 on Instagram. The culture will still place value on shorter ones. While the 140-character count was originally inspired cellphones and SMS, it was an arbitrary number. Too many (yes you!) have an emotional attachment to it. You can still choose to write shorter tweets and many do. In fact, I make a BOLD prediction near the end of this post!

EVIDENCE BASED PLANNING: It’s not like this idea came out of nowhere. There has been some good data to show that Twitter users desire a change like 280. Twitter has been carefully considering how best to attract users and more engagement.

According to their publicized data chart (see below), most Japanese users use only 15 characters and don’t hit the maximum that often. This implies, perhaps not too strongly, that 280 characters will benefit English tweeters to not max out and they will still have much shorter tweets from time to time. The second piece is that 9% of all English Tweeters hit the limit. This implies that many are cramming the space. I personally do this sometimes, changing tenses, losing punctuation and even taking out verbs (about = abt). I would argue an even higher percentage of users would welcome more space.

Yet the two most important pieces of evidence cited is that users of more complex languages will likely sign on to try Twitter and those who have less time will enjoy it more because they are not spending time trying to be so concise in 140 characters. This will both add users, create more tweet engagement since we now have more time and space.

BETTER CONNECTION: Isn’t this what every social platform wants? LinkedIn recently has been putting more focus on authentic connection and posts. It’s working. Twitter can do the same with the 280 and allow more depth of interaction. My Digital Marketing friend @BilalJaffrey said this about the 280: “It allows better expressions of ideas and this will likely improve engagement and will allow deeper connections”. I couldn’t have said it better. He also thought the 280 will lead to less typos. Maybe!

Why This 280 May Be Bad

NEGATIVE RESPONSE: Twitter is both brutal and brilliant when it comes to humor. We have already seen voluminous jokes about how ‘we hate this’, dread about how we ‘fear change’, and pandemonium over ‘should I stay or should I go’, ‘thanks but no thanks’.

CLOGGING TWEETS: We may see even more junky tweets. Do people really need to put their signatures in tweets now? Or worse, maybe legal fearing tweeters will throw in spam/legal notices in every tweet like email. Ugh!

USERS LEAVE: I doubt all the heavy users will leave. If the engagement gets more creative and open, you will see more users join and try it out.

140 IS ENOUGH! This has been an emotional response by many. I see Twitter as doing what Instagram did with video. First, they had it at 15 seconds and then upped it to 60 seconds. They didn’t go higher like other platforms. What do we see now on Instagram? Either short 5-10 videos or full 45-60 videos.

Where Is There Twitter Opportunity?

HARASSMENT AND ABUSE: This is the single biggest challenge for Twitter. Most would agree this is the game-changer it needs. Twitter recently acknowledged getting tougher by 10x on abusive accounts. But then there is Donald Trump. Arguably, many of his past tweets are a strong case for cyber-bullying. Many ask why he is still allowed on Twitter. The truth is that he has almost single-handedly kept Twitter relevant in the past year or so. Had he not rose to prominence as commander-in-tweet, the company may have lost even more active users. I predict Twitter will not do a more active job with the vile rhetoric until they see, with confidence, a growing user base.

BAD BOTS: Twitter needs to spend more time minimizing the usage of bots. Or even better, give us the tools to create more effective ways of either using them positively or minimizing their affect on our user experience.

BETTER ANALYTICS AND TARGETS FOR ADS: If Twitter wants more businesses or even entrepreneurs like myself using ads, give us better analytics and targeting tools to effectively give us ROI on business development and marketing. For now, I spend most of my dollars on Facebook advertising for this very reason. It’s a gap that Twitter can and should leverage.

GIANT FONT: Much like Facebook using giant font size for posts 35 characters or less to encourage brevity, Twitter can do the exact same thing. They can choose an arbitrary number, say 60 characters, where the text appears large font in your stream, thus encouraging tweeters to keep some tweets short and sweet like always. In fact, this opportunity is part of my BOLD prediction at the end of this article!

What’s Next for 280: Bold Prediction!

Speaking of bold predictions, here is where I predict the game-changing nature of the 280 rule – there will be a higher currency in shorter tweets. I predict we will see 2 main types of tweets.

1, Higher value short tweets, as the quip, the one idea, the bold statement

2. The longer form tweet, as the short story, creative expression, concise yet detailed argument.

This prediction is like the Instagram video example I gave above. We do the same thing with texts, either super short or longer ones (for Gen X and Boomers especially). Twitter may eventually large-size the text of shorter tweets like Facebook does. It’s a best practice that works and shouldn’t be ignored.

Given all of the above, Twitter will still own the culture of brevity, offer more creative expression and deeper connection, and ultimately bring more users to engage and tweet more often.

Is that a game-changer? You betcha!

Bobby Umar

Speaker, Coach, Author, Social Media Influencer

www.raeallan.com

#socialmedia #twitter #marketing #branding #linkedin