Yesterday, Twitter announced on its blog the character count limit would increase for everyone from 140 to 280. They began testing the higher character limit and found it did not drastically alter the way people use Twitter, which is popular for its brevity.
When testing began in September, marketers naturally began to wonder how this would affect the way we talk to audiences on social media. With literally DOUBLE the text, would our message be diluted by half?
Interestingly, most people continued to tweet less than 140 characters. It is something we have gotten used to. But even if they went over 140 characters, it wasn’t by much. We just needed a little more space. So Twitter rolled out #280 across the board.
And people freaked out.
No. Obviously, it almost looks like double the work to get our message through double the copy. But at the end of the day, if your content is great, people are going to read it, regardless of how much content there is out in the Twitter-verse.
Just stay focused on being a good writer and giving away information your readers are looking for.
We read a lot of social media posts from marketing blogs, search engine optimization websites, listen to podcasts on the way to work and carefully analyze what we are writing and if it’s working. Here is what we have learned:
Stay up-to-date on research regarding timing and number of posts. New studies come out pretty regularly, so set a reminder on your calendar to do a quick google search every few months.
Current research on best practices tells us:
Be respectful of the time your audience spends on social media. A newsfeed filled with random quotes that don’t benefit your business is a cheeseball way of trying to hit a "social media best practices minimum." It’s kind of like keyword stuffing. Don’t do it JUST to do it.
Social media basically made everyone a journalist. If you read something interesting, share it. But research its validity first!! Don’t share bad information. And back it up with numbers.
Provide value by carefully thought out content your followers want to read.
Being a strategic partner is a great business practice and social media marketing is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website using authentic, awesome content.