3 Big Features From Twitter’s New 280 Character Limit

In recent weeks, Twitter unveiled an Earth-shattering new feature that doubles the size of Tweets. The once set in stone 140 character length has now been doubled to 280 characters, which effectively now makes a tweet far more like a novel than the brief haiku that it was before.

How can users and brands more effectively take advantage of the extra space? While the opportunities are still presenting themselves, we wanted to highlight three of the biggest changes that this means for the platform.

More Mentions

While things like images and links often don’t add up in Twitter’s character count, mentioning another account always does. For example, if you’re listing all of the guests of a podcast, you might not have had much room to say anything else within a single tweet under Twitter’s old character count limits.

But now with 280 characters, it’s far easier to mention many more other colleagues, participants, partners, or others within a single tweet. Getting as many mentions in as possible is always a big help in terms of spreading your message as well, as those mentioned will often be encouraged to heart or retweet.

More Hashtags

The larger space of 280 characters also means more hashtags that can be used. Of course, these need to be used wisely and not in a spamming manner, but plugging your tweet into as many areas as possible will ensure that the additional demographics seeing more hashtags are part of the conversation as well.

Our advice in utilizing these additional hashtags is to save them for the bottom of your tweet. Have your main message at the top, but hit enter and save the few more hashtags that the additional character limit allows for at the bottom. This way, the hashtags will still serve their purpose but won’t detract from the main messaging up top. Plus, you might still have the original character length up top as well!

More Story

If you frequent Twitter, you might have noticed the trend of “threaded tweets” in the recent year or so. Users will reply to themselves for a long chain of tweets that have so much content that they could almost be a blog post.

With Twitter’s new character limit, telling a story or having a longer narrative is a lot easier. Threaded tweets are still being churned out by many users, but they’re now taking around three or four tweets to flesh out as opposed to the dozens that had cluttered up newsfeeds in recent years. Being able to more effectively use language without having to condense or abbreviate has also allowed brands and users to better expand on jokes, stories, news coverage, and much more.

With so much more space to stretch on Twitter recently, it might be tougher for brands to find the right stories to tell. Thankfully, that’s where we come in at WebDetail. We’re currently exploring more creative ways we can utilize the extra space on Twitter, and we’d love to talk with you about how we can make that space work for you as well.