10,000 characters on Twitter? Edit Button First Jack.
January 6, 2016
Twitter, every marketer’s greatest challenge. How do you consolidate a strong message into 140 characters, even less if you have a link or image attached? How do you strengthen your company’s brand and tone when your biggest focus is the character counter seemingly instantaneously hitting the -20 (and it’s red, just so you can feel the burn of your failure)? And the sheer sense of victory you experience when you have done it! Fitted it all (link, image, hashtag and witty tone) in, admittedly using icons and symbols and approving grammar crimes you took an oath to never commit. But…you…did…it!
And now Twitter is dilly-dallying with longer contextual messages? What would that be – a bird-call or bird-song instead of a tweet? And why now? Is it because of their continuing net loss? Is it an attempt at innovation? Blog envy? Worry? Desperation? Genius????
Could it be the only way they can think of to monetize? Offering this as a paid option to businesses to have an increased tweet space or even to add adverts into the extended tweet. Think about the possibilities – paying for the ability to increase your characters up to 10,000 and allowing for the addition of paid advertising along with it (much like Google has its PPC ads featured on the side or above organic search results).
Or are they? If they aren’t serious about this change (and let’s face it, regret over not acquiring Instagram and worry over Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr aside, why would they want to lose their unique selling point by mimicking other networks?), then this may be one of the best PR stunts we have seen in a long time…I guess only time will tell.
If you can’t picture what a 10,000 character tweet looks like, you can now thanks to Drew Olanoff, and we honestly can’t thank him enough! Go on, have a read and see for yourself. Yip, that’s right. If given the opportunity, the much beloved tweet may turn into what lands on your car window at the most inopportune moment. We already have a Facebook, we have more blog platforms than we can count and more content pieces of up to 10,000 characters than people can read. We even use Twitter as a shout-out linking to these pieces. It’s all part of the symbiotic relationship and uneasy balance that we maintain between the social media profiles we all manage.
Twitter’s mission is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers. But perhaps some barriers are meant to stay in place, for everyone’s sake! (and Jack Dorsey, we aren’t talking about the barrier to editing…feel free to add that edit button at any time!).
Stay tuned to see how it all turns out.
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