RICK REA: Helping You Grow Through Online Marketing
  • Home
  • Blog
    • Social Media News
    • SEO Marketing News
    • Digital Trends News
    • Photography News
    • Mobile Marketing
    • Business News
    • Gadget News
    • Printing News
  • Contact
  • About
  • Subscribe


What 280 characters means for Twitter's future

11/7/2017

0 Comments

 
http://ift.tt/2zrIP3W

What 280 characters means for Twitter's future

http://ift.tt/2zrIVZm


At its core, the internet as we know it exists in a state of permanent contradiction where everything both simultaneously lasts forever and is constantly in flux. 

It's perhaps fitting then that Twitter, the social media service most identified with brevity, has doubled the upper character limit its users can tweet, while at the same time insisting the fundamental change in no way alters its essence.

But can Twitter thrive in this liminal state of concise and verbose, and what does the change mean for a platform that struggles to add real users at the same time it fails to identify and delete fake ones? 

While the company has run tests on what preselected individuals do with a 280-character limit, that experiment was necessarily limited to a small segment of the overall Twitter population. What giving 280 to everyone will mean for Twitter's future is a difficult question, and one with neither a 140- or 280-character answer.

But that hasn't stopped Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey from guessing. And as with many things in Silicon Valley, the decision appears to have come down to growth. In a prepared statement, the company said it hoped the expanded character count will increase engagement, and allow people to spend less time editing their tweets before hitting the publish button — apparently a desirable goal in and of itself.  

The culture of Twitter grew out of the site's rules and constraints. Changing those will undoubtedly have an effect on that culture.

"Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit," read the press release. "This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer."

So, we know the "why" of the thing, but the long-term effects are perhaps harder to suss out. In the immediate future, we can expect to see scores of obnoxiously long tweets that take advantage of the increased character count to spam users' feeds, but Twitter insists that trend will quickly pass. 

"People did silly (creative!) things like writing just a few characters per line to make their Tweets extra large," the company explained of its 280 test in the same statement. "It was a temporary effect and didn’t last long. We expect to see some of this novelty effect spike again with this week’s launch and expect it to resume to normal behavior soon after."

However, it's what comes later — not the "soon after" — that will really matter. The character-limit change isn't a "silly" one. Rather, it fundamentally alters the amount of information that can be shared with each tweet — and it's particularly difficult to know what Twitter's 330 million monthly active users will do with that new power. 

Like the famed Oulipo novel omitting the letter "e," the culture of Twitter grew out of the site's rules and constraints. Changing those will undoubtedly have an effect on that culture, and day-to-day users may not respond so kindly. Doubling the length of tweets might, possibly, have the unintended consequence of dulling the service in an as-of-yet undetermined manner. 

i have never, and never will, read a full 280 character tweet

— steven j. horowitz (@speriod) October 8, 2017

Now that every tweet has the potential to be a paragraph in length, will Twitter become less about "what's happening" and more of a LiveJournal-esque blogging platform? Or, perhaps, the acerbic tone encouraged by the site's previously imposed limit will slowly fade away — leaving nothing but thoughtful discussions and rambling polite disagreements (don't hold your breath).

Perhaps an instructive example can be found in Mastodon, the open-source social media platform that mimics Twitter in some ways while differing in important others. There, in one of its many instances, users have long been able to send 500-character messages. That, plus admittedly heavy moderation, has led to a seemingly less hostile user experience than offered by Twitter — something Twitter's advertisers would likely kill for.  

Perhaps Jack Dorsey has been paying attention. 

Because while it may be inscrutable to the common user, Dorsey clearly has a vision in mind — one that involves people spending increasing amounts of time on his platform. However, from the perspective of those already using the service every day, the long-term effects of this character limit increase might not be so subtle as Twitter continues over the years to slowly bend to the demands of user growth. Whether it finally settles on 280, 420, or 540 character-length tweets is anyone's guess. 

In the end, the final specific character count permitted by Twitter may not actually matter that much. What today's change makes clear is that the future of the service is a cluttered one, and the site's users will just have to get used to brevity and verbosity occupying the same space at the same time. Fortunately for Twitter, that's exactly the kind of mental juggling act that the internet, in all its wonderful contradictions, was made for. 

 





Social Media

via Social Media http://ift.tt/1N1mMj1

November 7, 2017 at 07:50PM

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.


    Amazing WeightLoss

    Click Here!

    Categories

    All
    Analyze Top Competitors
    Anti-Abuse
    Apple
    Apple Watch
    Blog Posts
    Brainstorm
    Brand Awareness
    Communications
    Content Marketing
    Conversion Rates
    Editorial Calendar Tips
    Engagement
    Facebook
    Google Analytics
    How To Marketing Tips
    Influencer
    Instagram
    Instagram Live
    Keyword Search
    Marketing
    Marketing Automation
    Picture Quotes
    Podcasts
    Recording Videos
    Repurpose Blogs
    Research Trends
    Sales Funnel
    SEO Marketing
    Sharing Posts
    Slide Shows
    Smartwatch
    Social Media Marketing
    Social Media News
    Social Media Tools
    Social Selling
    Target Marketing
    Twitter
    Twitter Notifications
    User Interaction
    Video
    Video Marketing

    Archives

    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • Blog
    • Social Media News
    • SEO Marketing News
    • Digital Trends News
    • Photography News
    • Mobile Marketing
    • Business News
    • Gadget News
    • Printing News
  • Contact
  • About
  • Subscribe