In the last 48 hours it has been revealed that Twitter is making a few changes with regards to its 140 character limit. Twitter announced on Tuesday that it will be rolling out these changes over the next few months, and so we thought we would summarise them here for you, to let you know what affect it will have on the way you tweet.
Media attachments
First up, you no longer need to worry about keeping your text short to fit in your attachment, as media now no longer counts towards your character limit. Photos, links, gifs, videos will now be additional to the 140 characters. However, links still count so any url included in your tweet will still take up the 22 characters it has done previously.
Replies
Replies have also changed. When replying to a tweet, the @username no longer uses up any of your characters. This is useful for those conversations you are in with a number of people, as once you have included 3 or 4 @'s in your tweet you have very little room to tweet your message.
.@ mentions
These new changes on Twitter will also see the @mention at a beginning of a tweet appearing in all of your followers timelines, and not just those who follow both you and the @user. In the past, it has been required that a full stop must be entered before the @ so it can be seen, but now that is no longer needed. However, replies to this converstaion will still only be seen by those who follow both users.
Retweeting yourself
You will also be able to retweet or quote your own tweets - which will be great if you feel a tweet went unnoticed or you want to resurface an older tweet if it is still relevant or you want to add to.
Twitter did mention a few months ago that it was getting rid of the 140 character limit, and rumours of it going up to 10,000 characters surfaced (as mentioned in our previous blog post). There have been many mixed reviews on Twitter towards these changes, with a lot of users happy and some not so. For us, it seems like they won't impact massively but they will give some flexibility when adding media files etc. Twitter has been battling for a while now to compete with some of the big boys in social media, so will this help them recover?
What do you think of the changes? We'd love to hear your thoughts.