What Do Twitter’s Changes Mean for Your Social Media Marketing?

Twitter is an excellent social media marketing tool for busy small business owners.

Twitter’s 140-character limit keeps your marketing message short and sweet, and it sets the platform apart from other social media sites. The character limit is so popular that rumors earlier this year of plans to greatly expand tweets from 140 to 10,000 characters seem to have been scuttled.

Instead, Twitter is preparing to change to the way certain elements in your tweets are counted. Until now, links, photos, videos and “@ replies” counted against your 140-character limit. That will change over the coming week, according to Twitter. Links to websites, photos and videos will no longer count against the character limit, so you can still use all 140 characters for your message.

It may seem like a small change, but these extra characters will affect your Twitter marketing efforts in a few ways.

Allow more room for multimedia posts. Now that photos and videos don’t count against your limit, you can use a lot more of the without sacrificing the text of your marketing message. According to Twitter, simply adding a photo to your tweet can boost retweets by 35%.

Help your tweets to better reflect your company’s personality. It’s hard to squeeze a readable caption into a tweet stuffed with hashtags and hyperlinks. There’s only so much one person can abbreviate! Now, your tweets will have room to breathe and speak in full (if still brief) sentences.

In short, the new Twitter rules will allow you to post more dynamic, engaging content about your small business.