Amanda Clark — March 9, 2018 — March 9, 2018
Last November, Twitter doubled its famous 140-character count, meaning that Twitter users now have the luxury of a full 280 characters in each tweet. At the time, it was presumed to be the death knell for the platform, which had long been celebrated for its forced brevity. Most Twitter users acclimated to the new format pretty quickly, however. And, in the months that followed, Grammar Chic has received a number of inquiries from social media clients, wondering if they should be using all of this available space.
To be sure, this isn’t a simple question to answer—and to a large extent, it depends on your brand, your audience, and the nature of your tweets. We don’t recommend writing 280-character tweets just because you can; if your message works best in 140 characters or less, stick with that.
With that said, there are certainly some benefits to the relaxed character count—and some reasons why your business might take advantage of this new spaciousness.
Media Attachments are More Feasible Than Ever
With the old Twitter, it was challenging to compose tweets that included photos, captions, links, and hashtags; simply attaching a photo to your post ate up 40 of those precious 140 characters, right out of the gate. But with the new Twitter, media attachments don’t count toward your character limit, so you’ve got a lot more wiggle room to include visual content and still have room to do some writing and some tagging.
That’s probably the best way to avail yourself of longer tweets; you don’t have to write the Great American Novel, but you can include fully fleshed-out thoughts, attention-grabbing images, and plenty of hashtags and @ mentions to increase your reach.
You’ve Got More Room for Your Messaging
An even more obvious point is that longer tweets mean you’ve got a little bit more room for your marketing messaging. Now, caution is in order: There’s still something to be said for brevity. With that said, it’s nice that marketers can include links to product pages or to new blog posts, along with some brief commentary and hashtags, without having to worry as much about spilling over that character limit.
Again, our advice isn’t necessarily that you should try to fill up each 280-character tweet with text; just use the space you have to ensure a full-bodied thought, along with appropriate tags, links, and media.
Be Strategic in Your Tweets
The debate over long vs. short content is nothing new, and it’s hardly confined to Twitter. By all means, stretch out your business tweets when you feel it’s appropriate, but make sure you’ve got a strategy in place to guide all your content creating decisions.
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