Twitters New 10,000 Character Limit

If you’ve spent any time in the past couple of days on Twitter you will have noticed everybody getting in a hissy about Twitters new feature it will be introducing shortly – the #characterlimit changing from 140 characters max to 10,000. Yes that’s a big jump.

And yes the appeal of Twitter was that it was a microblogging site… and so before you get all upset – don’t worry because that isn’t going to change.

When you open up your Dashboard it will all look the same, don’t worry. The only difference is that some tweets will say “Read More” instead of having a link to an external website. The idea is to keep traffic on Twitter and not divert it elsewhere… them sly dawgs. And if you’re anything like me you hate having too many tabs up, so I’m very happy about this.

And think back to all the times you’ve had something absolutely brilliant or hilarious to say, only to be shot down – prevented from everybody knowing you’re actually very intellectual with a great sense of humour by Twitters 140 Character Limit. I’m sure this has happened to many of us. I always used to say I wish they would bump it up to 200 characters or so, but quite frankly I like this idea better.

And it comes with other benefits too.

For one thing, you don’t have to condense that rant into a measly sentence or two! Rant away my friend, there’s nothing stopping you now! And if you’re in a ranty/argumentative mood you now have a full format for a discussion *cough*swearing match*cough*. Have you ever seen or been involved in an argument on Twitter? It’s kind of frustrating for all involved as there isn’t much room to type out your full opinion. It normally just ends with someone (normally the loser) saying, “Eurgh, Twitter isn’t the place for these petty arguments.” Well now it is, hooray!

This is Twitter’s way of asking us to open up to it, to come back, to get close, to say more. It wants to increase engagement by giving us more room to move. And again, it’s not like there will be massive walls of text to scroll through in your feed.

Plus no annoying abbreviations now, you can write properly again, full English and everything. #YouWotM8.

If you’re worried that it will take away traffic from your website, well that’s all down to you. You can still use this opportunity to divert readers wherever and they’re more likely to click a link or want to find out more about you if they’re fully engaged in your post.

Twitter is also working out a plan for how to deal with potential spamming issues that might arise with an expanded character count, according to sources. It’s unknown, for example, if Twitter will restrict how many users can be mentioned in a single tweet, but the company is apparently thinking through those scenarios. Twitter plans to talk with some of its analytics and measurement partners to prepare them to handle longer tweets beginning later this month, according to sources.

In my opinion people just love a good moan, it’s good for us. And people don’t like change, but do not fear, the Twitter you know and love is here to stay. In the meantime 140 characters will have to do.

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