Twitter recently announced that it is expanding the number of characters permitted per tweet. Tweets have been limited to 140 characters since the platform’s debut, but now they are doubling that to 280 characters. Obviously, this means you can say more per tweet. But it doesn’t mean you necessarily should!
Twitter is all about fast-flowing, brief snippets. Expanding the character count doesn’t change the nature of the medium. It just makes it more flexible for those times when what you want to say cannot be condensed to 140 characters. Twitter’s own research shows that for English speakers, this wasn’t common. Less than 10 per cent of English language tweets hit the 140-character limit, but of course, we don’t have accurate measures of how many tweets were abandoned out of frustration with that limit. And some people would hit any limit. (We all know them!) Testing has shown one per cent of English language tweets hit the new 280-character limit.
So in practical terms, the new character limit means little for businesses using Twitter for their marketing. But there is a lesson in how Twitter did this.
Twitter’s change is good UX in practice. They noticed that a portion of tweets was hitting the limit. It didn’t take a massive lobbying effort by Twitter users. The company was paying close attention. They saw a problem, and they decided to take action to improve their service. Creating a good user experience isn’t something you do once and tick off your list. It involves watching how your web visitors use your site, how their behaviour evolves and what small issues are bubbling up.
Twitter then tested their increased character limit. Testing is an essential part of good marketing. If you aren’t measuring and monitoring, you don’t really know what is and is not working for your brand. When they saw that the change was having positive results and not causing any problems, they decided to roll it out. But note that they did watch for problems. They had concerns that an increased limit would lead to people using the platform differently, and that we’d all start sending out long tweets. That would miss the point of the network. And it didn’t happen.
Not all users will have an increased character limit, however. Twitter isn’t expanding the limit for users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese or Korean because those languages don’t hit the 120-character limit very often. They allow users to express more in fewer characters, so they have no need to increase their limit. This is a good example of why segmenting your market matters. When you know what different segments of your market want from your brand, you can give them just that. You don’t have to risk annoying or overwhelming them with offers they don’t want, while still being able to suggest things they might like. Few brands have just one profile of customer to please. Most have a few categories of buyers, and it pays to know them all well.
By Irene Hislop
By Jeff Sheridan
By Matrix Internet