Just a week ago Twitter rolled out to everyone the new standard for tweets of 280-characters. We are a year away to see what the true impact of this increase in 140-characters will do to all of us in communicating on Twitter. We still believe that short and sweet is the best way to reach most audiences as we are all actively busy with work and our personal lives. Doubling your character account can do a lot to your overall marketing strategy and we're going to take a look at some of the major items we are already doing for our clients.
Before we start we thought it would be good to cover how many people currently reach the 140-character limit of the "old Twitter". That number is just 9% of users. Most tweets are already shorter than 140-characters with the average being 34-characters. I know for us that is way too short even for our quick and short tweets. During the beta test of the fortunate few only 5% went over the 140-character limit.
With the test group which was extremely small only passing 5% over the 140-character limit one needs to wonder what all the big deal is. A tweet was meant to originally match that of a text message to be short, sweet, and to the point. Text messages now allows larger messages and Twitter has stayed in the old school but not anymore. Twitter is moving on and marketing companies will be taking advantage of this new space more each day. Ways that we see this impacting business is with more hash tags, abbreviations will be reduced, and longer messages.
Beyond that we see the less technical and hard to understand abbreviations will result in more likes, retweets, and @mentions within the platform which could increase the followers of brands.
Where we see the biggest increase is within the customer service space. Communication was always short, often too short, to cover the needs of a brands customers. With the increased amount of space customer service is going to be able to provide a lot more clarification and detail to improve the customer service experience.
Speaking of all these great benefits I can see some pitfalls as well. Many people see the extra space as a challenge to fill it. This will make people run from brands rather than too them. They will see businesses filling the added space with unneeded "fluff".
As per our philosophy as a company to provide great service, information, and not waste people's time we will be keeping our tweets as brief as possible but are glad we can break the 140-character barrier even if it's just to hit 150-characters to be less techy in our replies.