Twitter Exempts Media Attachments From 140 Char Limit

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There has been a lot of chatter about twitter giving up the 140 character limit that it had on tweets going on for a while now. Speculations about how that would augur for the platform have been making the rounds. Twitter yesterday announced that media attachments will no longer count towards the 140 per tweet limit

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Twitter made this known in classic style, with a tweet! And here is what they said:

 

What this means to the average user on twitter is that say when you add images to your tweets it does not count towards the total 140 characters that you get in a tweet, so you get to say what you want without letting the image url eat your character limit. As twitters tweet says  GIFs, uploaded photos, videos and other media – including quote tweets – no longer count towards your 140 characters per tweet. That’s a whole load of space to write creatively and at the same time add multimedia content to your tweet. Please note that links still count to your 140 character limit. It is only the multimedia that doesn’t.

In the days leading up to this, media was actually speculating about twitter entirely dropping the 140 limit off from tweets. While that is yet to be confirmed, we do certainly believe that it is one change that is on the way soon. Just a question of when rather than whether in that case we think.

Twitter originally announced the following:

  • @names would no longer be counted in replies
  • Media attachments would no longer count against your 140 character limit
  • You’d now be able to re-tweet yourself
  • Tweets that begin with an @name would be seen by all your followers

With today’s announcement, two of the four are now active – the outstanding update is one where @names are not counted in replies. Let us wait and see when that comes out. There’s also the tweets starting with @name going to all followers, that is how twitter was when it began, for some reason it was changed and it looks like we will get back there soon.

So if you are agency or a consultant, you can now go back to the drawing board and work with your clients to see how the freed uo real estate on the tweets can be used to improve messaging and brand building! And if you are wondering why this is great news, here’s an indicator for you!

And if you’re wondering, now that you can attach images without taking up any character space, what kinds of images you should be looking to attach, Twitter recently released data on which attachment types generate the best response.

  • Tweets that have images generate 3X more engagement than basic text updates
  • Tweets that have GIFs generate 6X more engagement than basic text updates
  • Tweets that have video generate 9X more engagement than basic text updates

Given those stats, it’s worth testing out the new changes and seeing what works for your audience. So go forth and conquer, the world is your proverbial oyster!

 

About Shakthi

I am a Tech Blogger, Disability Activist, Keynote Speaker, Startup Mentor and Digital Branding Consultant. Also a McKinsey Executive Panel Member. Also known as @v_shakthi on twitter. Been around Tech for two decades now.

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